Politics is all sports metaphors,” John McCain said the other day. “It’s unfortunately overwhelmed with clichés from sports. It’s sickening, almost.” ...
... he spoke with regret about “the inexorable movement of earlier and earlier primaries,” coupled with the compressed schedule of primary season. “You could never have a Hart-Mondale race anymore, where Hart won the early primaries and Mondale came back to defeat him,” he said...
[Note from Campaignia: McCain was referring to the protracted battle between Senator Gary Hart of Colorado - a good friend of McCain's - and former Vice President Walter Mondale for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, during which the primaries lasted for months. They became friends while McCain was serving as the Navy liaison officer on Capitol Hill, prior to his first election to the U.S. House in 1982. Hart, in fact, was an usher at McCain's wedding to Cindy Hensley, according to McCain's 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For, co-authored by long-time aide Mark Salter.]
The hard calls discussed in McCain’s book are an
eclectic and decidedly historical bunch: Solzhenitsyn’s decision to publish “The Gulag Archipelago,” Gertrude Ederle’s determination to swim the English Channel,
Reinhold Niebuhr’s conversion from pacifism. Still, an obvious contemporary issue came to mind. “Is Iraq a hard call?” he said. “I think it’s not that hard, because I have had no doubt. It hasn’t been a struggle within me.”
...
Bud Selig’s treatment of Barry Bonds was much the same. “I would have done one of two things: not go or stand up and applaud,” he said. McCain is still an either /or kind of guy...
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