Did John McCain kill the House in November of 2018?
Why would anyone say that? After all, McCain was already dead when the election occurred. And he’d been in the Senate anyway.
But I have had the same thought as that expressed in this WSJ piece (at least, the first few sentences of the piece and the headline; I can’t get behind the paywall to read the article).
Here’s how it went:
The Republican Party lost its House majority on July 28, 2017, when Sen. John McCain ended the party’s seven-year quest to repeal ObamaCare. House leadership had done an admirable job herding cats. On the second try, we passed the American Health Care Act in May. Then McCain’s inscrutable vote against the “skinny repeal” killed the reform effort.
I already have written on the matter, and I reproduce it here [bold indicates quotes from links; the rest of the indented and italicized paragraphs are my own commentary]:
…[O]ne of the final reasons that many on the right feel a great deal of anger at McCain, his July 2017 vote against so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare:
…[McCain] stunned his party when the final vote was at hand early Friday when he voted “no” and killed the legislation.
In the process, the maverick dealt what looks like the death blow to the Republican Party’s seven-year quest to get rid of President Barack Obama’s 2010 health law.
Along with McCain, GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined Democrats in the dramatic 51-49 vote rejecting the bill despite intense pressure from the White House…
Before voting, McCain would not say how he would vote, but told reporters to “wait for the show” as he arrived in the Senate chamber.
Note that last paragraph. It was not just the vote itself that rankled—although that was bad enough, considering how long and hard the GOP had campaigned for the repeal (whether you think they were serious or not), and the fact that McCain himself had campaigned in 2016 on a promise to repeal Obamacare [written in September of 2017):
McCain did run [in 2016], as Trump is drumming, on a strong repeal-and-replace platform. In fact, it was the principal distinction he drew with his Democratic opponent, Ann Kirkpatrick. He would vote to repeal Obamacare. She would not.
McCain did not say that he would vote to repeal Obamacare, provided Democrats agreed. If he had, his Republican primary with Kelli Ward might have turned out differently.
McCain now says that Democrats made a mistake in passing Obamacare on a partisan basis, and that Republicans shouldn’t undo it on a similarly partisan basis. But that’s the equivalent of a Brezhnev doctrine on domestic policy. Democrats can enact legislation on a partisan basis. But Republicans can undo it only if Democrats agree.
McCain is undoubtedly correct that bipartisan policy changes are more enduring. But when one side acts unilaterally, it shouldn’t get a veto when the other side attempts to undo it.
More importantly, there is no bipartisan agreement possible to repeal and replace Obamacare, as McCain vowed to do. That’s because there is no Democrat willing to agree to the first step, repeal.
It was not just the complete impracticability of McCain’s stand, its divorce from political reality, that rankled, although that was the major thing (I wrote about it here). It was also the seeming hypocrisy of his campaign promises vs. his later actions, as well as the theatricality of failing to reveal his vote in advance and telling reporters to “wait for the show.”
These things did seem characteristic of McCain, at least some part of McCain, although somewhat exaggerated. But I have one caveat to offer when thinking about this episode, and that’s the fact that McCain had already been diagnosed with a glioblastoma and had undergone a three to four hour brain surgery about two weeks prior to the vote. Though widely reported to not be suffering from any cognitive decline, this is part of what led to his diagnosis:
He also told his doctor he had, at times, felt foggy and not as sharp as he typically is. In addition, he reported having intermittent double vision. These symptoms and doctor intuition prompted a CT scan.
A brain tumor can affect a person in global and obvious ways or in subtle ones. Perhaps McCain’s tendency towards what, for want of a better word, we’ll call maverickyness was accentuated by brain changes accompanying both his illness and his surgery. So personally, I think that all the decisions he made post-brain-tumor should have an asterisk next to them.
Note also that McCain wasn’t alone among Republicans in voting against the measure. Collins and Murkowski joined him. However, it was McCain’s vote that counted and was purposely dramatic. Had he voted “yes,” the tally would have been 50/50 and Pence could have broken the tie.
Did McCain’s “no” cause the GOP to lose the House? Maybe. If so, however, it was certainly misplaced anger on the part of any GOP voters who stayed home because of it. The fault was the Senate’s and McCain’s, not the House members’ at all.
I’m actually not at all sure it mattered in terms of the outcome in the House in the 2018 election, however. First of all, the Democrats had history on their side; there is almost always a big gain for the opposition party in the midterms. Secondly, I think voters were already very negative in polls on all the GOP’s proposed bills. Every single one (and there were many) had generally gotten terrible press from the MSM, and even many Republicans were against them.
Would the passage of this particular bill have mattered? At the time of McCain’s “no,” I wrote this about the bill and its flaws as well as its opportunities:
Here is [McCain’s] statement [on why he voted “no”]; you can read it and judge it for yourself. On the surface, this sort of thing makes sense:
The so-called ”˜skinny repeal’ amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The Speaker’s statement that the House would be ”˜willing’ to go to conference does not ease my concern that this shell of a bill could be taken up and passed at any time.
The idea that the details of a “replace” bill should be ready to go when “repeal” is passed, and that we shouldn’t trust promises that it will be taken up in a timely fashion, seems sensible. The problem is that this was originally tried, and it couldn’t pass, either.
The “skinny repeal” bill was a compromise arrived at in order to get the negotiations to continue, including probably some changes in the House. “Skinny repeal” was a Sancho Panza bill, as it were. McCain is the Don Quixote here (that is, if you think he’s sincere—and many people would say he’s not).
Here’s an example of what he’d like to see happen, taken from his statement on the reasons for his “no” vote [emphasis mine]:
I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict-party line basis without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace. We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people. We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve.
Everything except that highlighted bit is possible, but bipartisanship has gone the way of the dodo and “reach-across-the-aisle” McCain fails to realize it (although if you think he’s insincere, you’d amend that to say he realizes it and doesn’t care because this is all a pose on his part). The problem is that McCain’s own voting “no” on the skinny repeal is probably the best way to ensure that none of the things on his list will be happening.
So McCain’s “no” was very effective in blocking further action on Obamacare repeal, and although I’m not sure the GOP wouldn’t have lost the House anyway had the Senate passed “skinny repeal” (for example, could they have actually passed an effective and popular “replace” bill in time?), I am sure that the failure of the GOP in Congress to do anything about Obamacare when they controlled the legislature, after all the promises they had made, did in fact hurt them in November of 2018. Whether it struck the fatal blow for the GOP-dominated House—or rather that blow would have landed anyway—I do not know.
I don’t know if better leadership in the House could have saved the majority. It wouldn’t have hurt, that’s for sure.
Here’s Jason Lewis’s ending paragraph:
The late Arizona senator’s grievance with all things Trump was well known, but this obsession on the part of “Never Trump” Republicans has to end. Disapprove of the president’s style if you like, but don’t sacrifice sound policy to pettiness.
Whether this vote came from the glioblastoma or McCain’s vindictive character, the fact is that failure to kill or even modify Obamacare is his final legacy.
We now have to rely on the possibly faint hope of the court case claiming that since the Roberts Court upheld the law only because the penalty was a tax, and since the tax has been repealed, the whole thing falls down.
You can’t get behind the paywall? You should subcribe, it’s very inexpensive.
penny:
Gift Neo the subscription. it’s your money to spend.
Perhaps the most interesting fact regarding the absence of the grotesquely over-esteemed Senator from Arizona is the behavior of the newly-liberated Lindsey Graham.
I’ll try to be temperate.
McCain was a G-ddamned attention whore and egomaniac punk who cruised through the Senate on his wife’s money. Given that, I don’t care how much he was tortured decades earlier.
I just wish that he was not maimed so that someone would have felt free to give that bastard who sold our freedom away, the face pounding he deserved.
I’m not joking. These “persons” piss away centuries of political and economic liberties for the sheer joy that playing God and stroking their egos in public gives them.
The next thing you might expect me to say would be “to Hell with John McCain”.
I’ll forbear … if this constitutes forbearance.
“to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens.”
What hubris for politicians to think they can do that. In 1995 Tennessee passed Hillary Care, only they called it TennCare. There was great celebration because it was going to deliver readily available, affordable quality health care to Tennessee citizens. The first year budget was 2.5 billion dollars. In 2004 the budget was 8 billion dollars and the state vastly scaled back TennCare. It had become the largest line item in the state budget and was on the way to bankrupt the state. The cost of TennCare tripled in less than a decade. What did people think was going to happen with Obama Care?
The author Jason Lewis is a Republican congressman from Minn. who just lost his re-election bid.
He goes on to quote healthcare lies published in the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
The amount of money spent by Dems this cycle was really incredible. One of my standing jokes is how the fat-cats are the primary funding source for Dems, in the last decade or so. But in this cycle, they AND the average Joe and Jane ponied up some serious cash for the Dems.
I have nothing good to say about McCain. One can wonder about his tumor, but I don’t think his late behavior was even a tiny bit different than his long track record. If one wants to guess as to his motives, I’d put his billionaire wife/widow at the top of the list. Who do you really think wore the pants in that household?
I’ve gone on at some length about how in the battle between style and substance of political candidates, Martha McSally was her own worst enemy. Even though I like her substance. Imagine that you are a concerned and attentive independent voter in AZ and listened carefully through McCain’s last primary, election, and watched the ACA repeal effort. So are you then fired up by the new GOP candidate and her basket of new promises?
Probably, the McCain factor was a small one for McSally, but just a 1% shift might have done the trick. I suspect that selective “vote curing” and other fraud factors can generate a 0.25 to 0.5% shift for the Dems in AZ.
As an Arizonan, I always voted for John McCain, but I lost all respect for him when he voted “no” on the Obama care repeal. I was then disappointed that he didn’t resign when he and his family knew that he would never return to the Senate.
At least our governor did not appoint his wife to his seat.
What DNW said…without the temperance.
In my opinion, DNW, John Guilfoyle and others commenting similarly in this thread have got it right.
In the Senate chamber that fateful day, McCain demonstrated for all to actually see his sheer joy in being the senator who destroyed Republican’s credibility on the health care issue. Sure, he probably justified doing this because he would be getting back at his arch-enemy Trump. But in doing so, he severely hurt his country and his party. (Dems on the other hand severely hurt the country while helping their party.) As appalling as Trump’s completely uncalled for comments about McCain were, McCain had no reason to sabotage the potential success of the rest of us. Shame on him.
The Republican Party lost its House majority on July 28, 2017, when Sen. John McCain ended the party’s seven-year quest to repeal ObamaCare. House leadership had done an admirable job herding cats. On the second try, we passed the American Health Care Act in May. Then McCain’s inscrutable vote against the Senate’s “skinny repeal” killed the reform effort.
McCain’s last-minute decision prompted a “green wave” of liberal special-interest money, which was used to propagate false claims that the House plan “gutted coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.” That line was the Democrats’ most potent attack in the midterms.
It was endlessly repeated by overt partisans in the media. An especially egregious column in Minneapolis’s Star Tribune asserted the AHCA would turn back the clock so that “insurers could consider sexual assaults and even pregnancy [to be] pre-existing conditions.” In fact, the bill prohibited sex discrimination and stated: “Nothing in this Act shall be construed as permitting insurers to limit access to health coverage for individuals with pre-existing conditions.”
The problem was—and still is—that under ObamaCare all policyholders are charged as if they are sick. If restoring a modicum of traditional underwriting by loosening the Affordable Care Act’s strict age-rating rule discriminated against the old, then ObamaCare was—and is—discriminating against the young. The AHCA would have relieved this problem by allowing states to opt out of ObamaCare’s most onerous mandates and instead cover the most difficult-to-insure with $138 billion worth of high-risk pools. That would have arrested the ObamaCare “death spiral” and, as the Congressional Budget Office admitted, reduced both premiums and the deficit.
Emerging in response to World War II-era wage and price controls, health insurance has been tied to employment. When older workers lose their coverage along with their job, it creates a serious barrier for entering the individual market, as pre-existing conditions are often the result of age. This is primarily due to an unfair tax code that gives employers but not individuals tax breaks for buying insurance.
Again, the AHCA sought to even the playing field by offering a refundable tax credit anyone could use to buy an individual plan. The bill also would have expanded tax-deferred health savings accounts to help cover deductibles, copayments and over-the-counter expenses.
All these provisions were an attempt to alleviate the pre-existing condition problem, not exacerbate it. To be sure, instead of running away from health-care reform after it failed, Republicans should have leaned in on the plan’s most important aspects. But because the AHCA didn’t pass, it was impossible to refute the lies about it.
The late Arizona senator’s grievance with all things Trump was well known, but this obsession on the part of “Never Trump” Republicans has to end. Disapprove of the president’s style if you like, but don’t sacrifice sound policy to pettiness.
Mr. Lewis, a Republican, represents Minnesota’s Second Congressional District.
His long and loudly trumpeted POW status aside, McCain served his country so badly as to be nearly a traitor. He was also a shitty pilot, benefitted from his family connections, was damn near last in his Academy class. Should have been a dog-catcher instead.
Remember the Keating Five? In 1987, when Big John had been a US Senator for only two years, McCain was found by the Senate Ethics Committee to have exercised “poor judgment”, though he had taken more money from Keating than any of the others. Re-elected, of course. I rather suspect his “maverickness” had to do with occult graft, way more than principle.
Remember McCain-Feingold?
He was a stupid, selfish man who hated his opponents with such hate as Trump has never had for anyone. He also had a greedy, grasping wife, a white Michelle O.
He stayed home with his glioblastoma, knowing death was certain (it had also killed the “Lion of the Senate”, Teddy Kennedy), did not resign, did nothing to represent his state in the last 6 months of his long and sorry life.
He made it possible for the weak and unprincipled Ryan to become Speaker by pulling him out of well-deserved wonkish obscurity to make him a Veep candidate; note that Ryan has now quit the House.
Perhaps glioblastomas visit deserving politicians?
John McCain never made Admiral like his dad and grandfather. He also divorced his first wife after she was in a disfiguring accident.
His actions speaks volumes.
Watch the video.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, was standing in the well of the Senate with his arms folded, as he watched each Senator come up and vote.
In casting his deciding vote McCain very theatrically walked to the well of the Senate–a few feet from McConnell and looking at him–dramatically struck a pose, stuck out his arm with his fingers splayed and palm down–held that pose for several seconds–then, gave the bill thumbs down to many gasps, and to some applause.
It seemed to me that, with his very public and theatrical gesture McCain was very deliberately sticking it to Trump (and to McConnell), never mind the effect it would have on millions of Americans.
See https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2017/07/28/watch-senate-members-gasps-applaud-mccain-votes-no-skinny-repeal/519289001/
No one in government, right or left, wants to give up power. Obamacare is power and its here to stay. The right might run on repeal, but no one wants it to happen.
doug whidden:
I disagree the “no one wants it to happen.” Plenty of people on the right do. But there hasn’t been a majority agreeing on what should replace it. And there are certainly also people on the right who mouth statements about wanting to get rid of it and yet really don’t want that.
Snow on Pine:
I think it was unquestionably a pointed, vindictive act.
I merely am saying that someone with an advanced brain tumor cannot be assumed to be acting in a manner he or she would have chosen without having that brain tumor possibly affecting decision-making, cognition, and emotion.
However, in McCain’s case, it certainly was not completely out of character with previous behavior. I do think it was more extreme, however. That’s my gut feeling about it.
“One can wonder about his tumor, but I don’t think his late behavior was even a tiny bit different than his long track record. ” — TommyJay
Agreed.
McCain should have resigned after losing the presidential election to Obama – because he should never have been the GOP candidate, even if someone else had been nominated by the Democrats.
However, the Arizona voters have much to answer for in continuing to return him to Congress despite a long string of ethical problems, back-stabbing his party, and broken promises (not entirely disconnected from each other), not to mention them finally re-electing someone who clearly was suffering from ill health and old age.
Too many people benefited from McCain’s congressional actions, as they did from Hillary’s and every other Senator and long-time Representative who just happens to find that his conscience exactly matches the interests of his big donors. Or hers. Or zers.
Whatever.
I don’t know if I completely support term limits ( I could be persuaded), but I do think we should have a mandatory retirement age, since the individual voters have shown no propensity for sanity on that subject.
I agree that McCain’s vote against repeal of the ACA affected a house seat here in Washington state. The Eighth Congressional District has been one of the few Republican strongholds in the state. Kim Schrier, the Democrat candidate, had a mantra about stopping the GOP’s plan to kill coverage of existing conditions as well as taking on big pharma. I thought those were non-issues and hoped voters would know that. Unfortunately, Dino Rossi, the GOP candidate didn’t say a word about health care – didn’t point out Schrier’s baseless claims. He lost. That was a pick up for the Dems. They spent a lot of money here and hit the health care mantra hard.
I suspect that was true for other house seats that went from red to blue. So mark me down as believing McCain’s vote was a help for the Dems.
McCain was a proud man but he had a vindictive streak. Trump’s remarks about his not being a hero triggered that. His whole life after the 2016 election was dedicated to getting even with Trump. Only a blind person could not see that the vote against the ACA repeal, his failure to resign after his fatal diagnosis, and his whole funeral and memorial were all designed to stick it to Trump. A fit of vindictiveness. Such a sad way to end one’s life. I say that as a fellow Naval aviator who has always admired McCain for his POW experience. But for the grace of God, I could have been one of his fellow POWs.
Link via PowerLine.
This would be funny, because of Sinema’s cluelessness about her own behavior per the “meth lab” videos and others, if it weren’t that the Dems didn’t “flip” the Arizona seats at all: Flake and McCain were only barely Republicans, and were Dems whenever it really counted.
Fisk at will.
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/11/12/2018-arizona-senate-election-sinema-mcsally-984928
“Sinema, in her victory speech Monday night, said she was grateful to McSally for her service, but said there was a clear choice in the race between them.
“Arizonans had a choice between two very different ways forward: One focused on fear and party politics, and one focused on Arizona and the issues that matter to everyday families,” Sinema said. “Arizona rejected what has become far too common in our country: name-calling, petty personal attacks, and doing and saying whatever it takes just to get elected.”
She also praised late Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) several times, calling him “irreplaceable” and saying “his example shines a light on our way forward.”
In addition to being Arizona’s first female senator, Sinema is the first Democrat to win a Senate election there in three decades. She will replace outgoing Sen. Jeff Flake, a first-term Republican “
McCain was a G-ddamned attention whore and egomaniac punk who cruised through the Senate on his wife’s money. Given that, I don’t care how much he was tortured decades earlier.
His voting record was satisfactory in general, but he had in the latter half of his years in Congress a tendency to throw a spanner into the works at inopportune times. An inexplicable antagonism to enforcing the immigration law was one of his signatures, as it was for George W. Bush, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake. Some people deteriorate as they age, and the character and personality defects you identify were his, to be sure. There’s also grumbling about his skills as a Naval aviator (some of it nonsense); that would probably be wise to leave to people who’ve been in the Navy.
One objection. His wife is a centimillionaire, but his own resources have been sufficient to meet the expenses of an ordinary bourgeois. He had his congressional salary and expense account and his military pension. Had he retired from Congress at the end of 2010, he’d have had a congressional pension and full Social Security as well. Had he never married Cindy, he’d have had to find another line of work after his discharge from the Navy, ’tis true (I think his separation from the service was imminent) I had a childhood friend whose has made a satisfactory living flying small cargo planes. My uncle worked for a long time in civilian positions in the Department of Transportation (though he had an engineering degree McCain lacked).
McCain should have resigned after losing the presidential election to Obama – because he should never have been the GOP candidate, even if someone else had been nominated by the Democrats.
No clue why you fancy ‘he should never have been the GOP candidate’. He won the nomination square. If you’ve a complaint, take it to GOP primary and caucus voters.
He should have retired at the end of his term. I don’t think we get a net benefit from politicians with peculiarly distended careers. The 28 years he’d logged in Congress by the end of 2010 were more than enough. Also, you get to a certain age, it’s time to let younger cohorts take over, whatever it is you’re doing. There weren’t any financial constraints compelling him to retain a handsome salary. If you want to keep working, you should be self-employed or in a common-and-garden wage job.
The right might run on repeal, but no one wants it to happen.
You don’t know what you’re talking about.
What hubris for politicians to think they can do that.
The TennCare program consumed 2% of the state’s nominal domestic product in 1994 and consumed 3.3% in 2016. You could maintain public expenditures at a particular share of the state’s discoverable personal income by incorporating a deductible and adjusting it each year, provided the federal authorities financing Medicaid and comparable programs do not interfere and debar such a practice. Our politicians can make this happen in any part of the country with two pieces of legislation, one federal and one enacted in the state in question.
I had not run across the information about McCain’s treatment of his first wife Carol until a few weeks ago.
From what I recently read, his first wife Carol, who he married in 1965, was a tall former swimsuit model, a very pretty woman, who was loyally waiting at home, taking care of their three children, while McCain was a POW from 1967 to 1973
But, before McCain was released his wife got into a horrific 1969 auto accident that maimed her, left her with facial scarring, and major injuries that reduced her height by five inches, and made it difficult for her to walk.
In 1973, when McCain got back–now a high profile figure–he started to go out partying, and to see other women, and eventually glomed on to Cindy, a very wealthy woman, 18 years his junior. In 1980 McCain divorced/discarded his crippled first wife, and married that heiress.
Not honorable treatment of a loyal wife.
As for whether McCain’s no vote resulted in several Republicans losing their races, I believe that, if McCain had voted yes, at least Republican candidates could have said that they had made an honest effort, a down payment on their promises to repeal Obamacare, that would eventually be followed by full repeal and replacement.
As it was, they had no Obamacare repeal accomplishments to offer, they only had failure, and could, very reasonably, be seen as having reneged on their many promises to “repeal and replace.”
He met Cindy Hensley in 1980, when he was in a trial separation from Carol.
Cindy Hensley was younger than Carol Shepp McCain. Photographs of Cindy taken in 1980 show her to be agreeably slim but otherwise of normal range looks. The same can be said of photographs of Carol taken ca. 1964. Photographs taken of Carol ca. 1986 do not show noticeable facial scarring. The notion that her ‘height was reduced by five inches’ without amputations sounds like an urban legend.
Art Deco–One of the articles I found that did go into some detail on Carol and her accident was an article in the “Free Republic” which quotes Carol McCain as saying, ” My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. ”
See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2027933/posts
This blog is an interesting read but it is representative of why many midterm races that should be solidly GOP are not. This article leads with a question that leaves the “maybe” answer buried and shifts to discussing the failure of the GOP to fulfill their promise on Obamacare. It doesn’t say how much this was a decisive issue with voters. And it doesn’t talk about Trump’s own role in motivating opposition and turning off swing voters. Weigh the three. McCain’s no vote. GOP’s failure to have a follow up plan on Obamacare or any real plan at all. Trump’s own provocative approach that creates an over the top reaction. It plays well to his base. But it repels the people beyond his base. Who has the bully pulpit and has the most potential impact on swing voters. The only saving grace is that the Democrats have been just as repellent to motivate enough reluctant GOP voters to step up. This article blog barely addresses Trump’s impact, but focuses on a myriad other things. Okay if you want to cater to a base who have already bought into McCain=RINO or Democrats=Evil. Not helpful in setting the discussion towards how the GOP needs to do X to win in the long term. It just blows air on those embers already hot with the base.
GerryR:
You probably are not a regular reader here; sounds as though you’re not, although of course I don’t know. But if I tried to be completely comprehensive in each post and cover everything relevant, I’d never have a moment of time to myself, and might manage to cover one topic a day, if that. However, I certainly have written about Trump’s ways of turning people off, many times. Many many times.
It’s not an either/or situation. There are many factors that have played into the GOP loss this election. This article is not meant to be a full analysis of what they might have been. It is meant to deal with the question of McCain’s role regarding Obamacare and how it might have affected the election.
@ GerryR “This article blog barely addresses Trump’s impact…”
What neo said. Your comment does not address demographic changes, voter fraud, immigration issues, the national debt, or improved hamster care as causes of the loss of the House. You seem to want to tell us that Trump is a jerk and we should just focus on that, because somehow we have never heard that rumor and need you to ‘splain it to us. Sorry that other subjects are off limits.
A bit of advice: when you visit a site, don’t automatically assume you are the smartest person there.
Art Deco–One of the articles I found that did go into some detail on Carol and her accident was an article in the “Free Republic” which quotes Carol McCain as saying, ” My accident is well recorded. I had 23 operations, I am five inches shorter than I used to be and I was in hospital for six months. ”
Fair enough. Now look at that picture. It’s a reasonable inference she colors her hair. That aside, she looks fine for a woman of 70. Here she is in 1973:
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1&biw=1256&bih=671&tbm=isch&sa=1&ei=YkPrW52WDuOG5wL1-4PgDA&q=carol+mccain+&oq=carol+mccain+&gs_l=img.3..0l8.7833.7833..8271…0.0..0.79.79.1……1….1..gws-wiz-img.2UCSDxau7dk#imgrc=vhkXbJvNrLufAM:
She isn’t disfigured.
NewNeo. Part of the issue is what you choose not to address just like your concern about what the MSM choose not to cover and what you focus on instead. After the election your two posts about why the midterms turned out to be close is this one about McCain and his Obamacare vote and an earlier one that people are still influenced by the MSM even though they dont trust them. Not much about how Trumps behavior itself is a driver of motivations to vote against the GOP except that his good traits are not transferable. Pandering to the base and gaslighting Democrats is not a foundation for future wins. This election and 2016 shows that it barely works as long as the Democrats dont have their own act together and take the bait. These close races in key states are a demonstration that if the Democrats do get it together in 2020 instead of overreacting to Trump we will find that the GOP and Trump have nothing built to last. People are tiring of this daily drama especially those who swing their vote.
AssistedVillage there are all kinds of issues but they are less impact than Trump has on a daily basis. What of any of issues the GOP are delivering on is getting out there beyond the daily Trump drama. The Democrats are going to figure out a better strategy maybe by 2020. 2018 midterm is an indicator that Trump is turning off voters and Democrats are making headway in key states that were reliably Republican. Ignoring the downside of Trump and not dealing with it will have consequences. Problem is that the base doesnt want to hear any of this. A blog that relies on those readers risks losing them if they ‘splain to them what they need to hear and deal with. Elections are won by coalitions. Where is the coalition building from Trump. Or is that too much ‘splainin.
“Democrats are making headway in key states that were reliably Republican. Ignoring the downside of Trump and not dealing with it will have consequences. Problem is that the base doesnt want to hear any of this. A blog that relies on those readers risks losing them if they ‘splain to them what they need to hear and deal with” – GerryR
Dear NewNeo,
It is pretty obvious this is a new commenter here, since this blog most emphatically does not rely on the Trump base and has no problem explaining things "those readers" don't want to hear and deal with.
However, he does make a good point, and it's even been addressed here, which is that the GOP really hasn't come to grips with why Trump even has a base, and what the party as a whole needs to do to better serve the expressed majority wishes of the country, which the courts (Dem appointees mostly but not exclusively) and legislators (McCain is egregious for purporting to support and then back-handing them) and some governors & presidents have ignored or actively thwarted.
GerryR:
You’re at the wrong blog.
This blog has talked a great deal about Trump’s flaws, and most of the people here are not big Trump fans and are well aware of the problems, and worried about their effect on the electorate.
Before you characterize a blog you should learn something about its history and perspective.
This blog has beat to death the idea that Trump turns a lot of people off. It doesn’t need to be said anymore, and certainly not often or in every single post on the subject of elections; it’s understood and a given.
He turns off a lot of people here. He’s done some good things as president, but unless you’re already on the right they don’t necessarily appeal to you, and the GOP doesn’t really know how to capitalize on them.
GerryR is a long winded concern troll. He/she/it/they is telling all about dire consequences (a scarecrow) that no one else can see, but is so gracious to ‘splain it to the deplorables who somehow can read Neo’s blog.