Joe McCain called Virginia suburbs "communist country," so now you know what kind of guy he is.
Swamp: Joe McCain, portraying himself as a sailor ringing a warning bell, describes the campaign team "poring over plans and maps and high-minded thoughts" while his brother's presidential ship steams toward treacherous waters.
Joe is particularly critical of top campaign officials (unnamed) who "so tightly 'control the message'" that they have cut the press off from those who know the candidate best (presumably including his brother). Joe McCain, who notes that he once was a reporter and has worked in campaign press shops, calls these news-management efforts "counter-intuitive, counter-experiential, and counter-productive."
Joe goes on to say that the decision to clamp down on press contact with intimates of the Arizona senator is "causing gangrene. It has gradually bled away all the good will that this great man had from the press, for he alone among politicians would talk to them openly, without finesse, without guile."
Reporters, he notes, once returned the affection "regardless of their political lean . . . they loved him nonetheless."
Part of his email:
This portrayal of John McCain as a scrapper, as an alley fighter so far in these debates and these TV ads misses a much higher calling that he has - to a distant hill where he will put behind him the scrap yards and the greed and will lead this land to a higher plane. For of all of John's many qualities - fighter, scholar, communer, reflector - the highest is vision and hope and ethics and a pull to the light, for John McCain knows where we came from, where we stumbled, where we were confused , and where we lit beacons to all other people who dream of sweeter things and a better place.
Let John McCain be John McCain, a Great Warrior and Leader of Men and Women, who sees a distant shore where the best of this land can gather and put behind them the scrapping and the greed and the disingenuous to pick up the markers left for us by the great men of our history, from Henry, Paine, Jefferson, Washington, Madison to Lincoln, the first Roosevelt, Eisenhower and Reagan. Men immune from the petty temptations to acquire wealth from the citizens for they saw a much brighter reward - to lead and to uplift. Full email here.
Yikes.
