McCain: Did he vote against President Bush?

last updated 8 January 2015

This just in: Sen. John McCain says he voted for President Bush. Normally, a prospective Republican presidential nominee would not have to convince anyone that he’d voted for his own party’s presidential candidate in the most recent elections, said Elisabeth Bumiller in The New York Times. But McCain, a maverick who has challenged Republican orthodoxy on everything from immigration to tax cuts, is not your typical GOP standard-bearer. So last week, when liberal blogger Arianna Huffington recounted overhearing McCain reveal at a Los Angeles dinner party seven years ago that he couldn’t bring himself to vote for Bush in 2000, McCain was forced to issue a firm denial. “We’re already in silly season,” said McCain, who in 2000 battled Bush for the GOP nomination. “I voted for, campaigned for, worked as hard as I could for President Bush’s election in 2000 and 2004.” But Huffington stood by her account, and two others who attended the party, West Wing actors Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff, insist they also heard McCain say he hadn’t voted for Bush.

So what? asked Jim Geraghty in National Review Online. Let’s not forget that the 2000 GOP race was a nasty affair, and that during the South Carolina primary somebody spread ugly rumors that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. “If McCain remained sore over it and couldn’t bring himself to vote for Bush within the privacy of the voting booth … well, who among us can begrudge him that?” But the point is that McCain campaigned vigorously for Bush, thus fulfilling “his duty to the party, to his formal rival, and to the political process.” Besides, as McCain aide Marc Salter pointed out, the aggressively liberal Huffington would “make anything up” if she thought it would hurt Republicans.

No matter how McCain voted, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com, he has some explaining to do. The party at which he allegedly made the anti-Bush remark was hosted by actress and liberal activist Candice Bergen in her home in—gasp—Hollywood. “Doesn’t this sound a little, er, elitist?” The true significance of Huffington’s “scoop” is that it reveals “the dirty secret that McCain is rarely more at home than with the liberal cultural elite.” Actually, Huffington may have done McCain a huge favor, said John Nichols in The Nation. “At a point when even conservatives are registering record levels of disdain for a sitting Republican president, it is hard to imagine anything more beneficial to John McCain than the reminder that the senator never had much affection for George Bush.”