Sen. John McCain, who will be 74 years old on Sunday, acknowledged winning the Arizona Republican Senate primary yesterday by reading prepared remarks from a teleprompter. McCain spent $20 million to defeat J.D. Hayworth, a disgraced Republican congressman, TV pitchman and local right-wing radio talk show host.
In order to win nomination for a fifth term in the Senate, McCain had to run to the right of Hayworth, whose main appeal was among tea baggers. McCain won with a margin of 25 percent, but in doing so he trashed his former pose as a principled politician by flip-flopping on immigration, campaign reform and other issues.
In a telling moment, McCain’s desperation to win at all costs even drove him to deny that he’d ever been a “maverick,” despite the fact that the term had been used by his presidential campaign as a theme at rallies and in television ads and that he’d applied the term to himself in multiple quotes that were easily found on the Internet.
McCain faces Democrat Rodney Glassman, a former Republican, whose campaign drove itself into a ditch last Friday, Aug. 20, when three of his top aides abruptly quit. Confidential sources say the resignations were a response to Glassman’s “berating staffers and volunteers in public, even yelling at them” and because of a homophobic remark he made about an openly gay Tucson city councilmember that the councilmember has confirmed.
Ironically, in a vote among staffers on Capitol Hill, John McCain was once named the second most bad-tempered elected official, behind the late Sen. Ted Stephens (R-Alaska). McCain also spouts anti-gay rhetoric, despite the fact that his wife and daughter have come out in favor of gay civil rights.
Since 2008, when McCain lost the presidency to Barack Obama, in part because he chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republicans have mocked Pres. Obama for undue reliance on teleprompters — despite the fact that during the presidential primaries and general election campaigns, Obama gave dozens of town hall meetings during which he spoke extemporaneously for 90 minutes or more, and the fact that he appeared in numerous live televised debates during which teleprompters weren’t used.
All of this makes teleprompter dependence another issue of rank Republican hypocrisy, similar to their running on family values and the sanctity of marriage when so many of its leading lights are notorious adulterers, particularly including Sens. John Ensign (Nevada) and David Vitter (La.) and S.C. Gov. Mark Sanford, to name three who are so unashamed of their hypocrisy (not to mention their sins) that they refuse to resign from office.
One of the most teleprompter-dependent Republican figures is Palin herself, who is incapable of stringing her thoughts together in a comprehensible way when when forced to speak extemporaneously. From our archives, here’s an expose of Palin’s secret teleprompter dependence, as well as a more recent photo of her flanked by teleprompters at the NRA convention in Charlotte earlier this year. (And here’s a link to a photo album of Palin and her teleprompter fetish.)
