You could call it an old-fashioned political gun fight in the west. Former GOP Congressman and tv-radio personality JD Hayworth announced today he would take on veteran Senator and former Republican presidential nominee John McCain for his senate seat.
Hayworth accuses McCain of being out of touch with Arizona voters on issues like illegal immigration, taxes and a slew of other things he says are important to people in the Grand Canyon state.
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By Michelle Malkin • February 10, 2010 01:35 PM
You’ve got to be freaking kidding me.
I mean, really. Come on:
As former Rep. J.D. Hayworth prepares to officially enter the Republican primary race against incumbent Sen. John McCain, he probably had better not count on any support from FreedomWorks, the national conservative group closely associated with the Tea Party movement.
In a telephone interview with The Arizona Republic, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, FreedomWorks’ chairman, delivered a surprisingly harsh assessment of Hayworth, with whom he served on Capitol Hill…
…Armey, who was House majority leader from 1995 to 2003, clearly came down on McCain’s side. “There’s nobody who can match McCain’s record on fiscal responsibility,” he said.
Over the last year, John McCain supported everything that the grass-roots Tea Party movement has stood against:
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Senator Jim DeMint is using his Senate Conservative Fund to support real conservative candidates in various Senate races across the county. So even though he has a relationship going back years in the Senate with McCain, the fact he was able to withhold support from McCain is telling. Sen. DeMint is the most conservative Senator in the U.S. Senate, with a lifetime rating of 99% from the American Conservative Union.
Until recently, he would then repair to a local radio station, where he would spend the better part of the day denouncing, in no particular order, illegal immigrants, all things Barack Obama, those who are insufficiently patriotic and, his favorite mark, one John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona.
Now, Mr. Hayworth, a former Republican congressman, is preparing to expand his political appetite for Mr. McCain by formally announcing next week what everyone in this state has known for months: his challenge to the senator in the Republican primary in August.
Mr. Hayworth hopes that by standing at the intersection of opportunity and timing, he can lure enough Tea Party sympathizers fresh off their convention in Nashville, seducible independent voters (Arizona has an open primary) and conservative Republican grass-roots activists, who have long been disenchanted with Mr. McCain.
“The political winds of change are here,” Mr. Hayworth, 51, said over lunch. “The conservatives are highly motivated, and there is an intensity level among conservatives to take part in this primary. The atmospherics will help us.”
Still bruised by his presidential run and struggling to find his footing in the fractured Republican Party, Mr. McCain remains a formidable force in his home state, through the sheer power of his name and fat campaign coffers. Most political analysts suggest that Mr. Hayworth begins as the underdog, and Mr. McCain’s supporters say they are confident.
Those who believe only Democratic incumbents are at risk in the 2010 election need look no further than Arizona.
Republican Sen. John McCain, the man who might have been president, suddenly appears vulnerable in his bid for a fourth term. A recent statewide poll conducted in January by the Behavior Research Center in Phoenix found McCain with a favorability rating of just 41 percent, his lowest numbers since 1994, when he was immersed in the Keating Five scandal.
Enter J.D. Hayworth, the former Republican congressman-turned-radio talk-show host and Tea Party champion. As Hayworth describes it, he was minding his own business, doing his talk show on KFYI-AM in Phoenix, when a Rasmussen Reports poll released at Thanksgiving showed him in a statistical dead heat in a hypothetical primary race against McCain.
Next thing he knew, the McCain campaign was running attack ads against him on his own radio station. “J.D. Hayworth,” the ads intone. “That’s not what Arizona wants.”
Read the rest. – HUMAN EVENTS
AZ U.S. Senate race makes the news
The Wall Street Journal has coverage of the U.S. Senate Republican primary in Arizona. Read the story at this link. Thanks to Arizona’s own Gila Courier.
In 2000, Senator John McCain asked me to campaign on his behalf for president. I was honored to do so. I remember traveling to South Carolina to act as a one-man truth squad and doing countless television interviews for John. It was a tremendous experience and, as we all know, John came up short. But as always, he fought hard for what he thought was right.
But the John McCain I supported for president in 2000 is not the same John McCain I’ve watched frustrate conservatives time and again as our senator. He still fights hard, all right, but too often for the wrong causes.
It is said that all good humor has a grain of truth in it. So when John McCain jokingly referred to the media as “my base,” we all laughed because we knew how true it was. But the media doesn’t need another senator – Arizona does. And Arizonans want a senator who will listen to them all the time, not just when there’s an election. So I will soon formally announce that I will challenge John McCain in the Republican primary for senator.
