The one thing I've learned from being John McCain's friend, you can survive that dynamic if you're really committed to what you believe in and don't sell people short. I have been in so many scrapes with John, whether it be detainee policy, campaign finance reform, the Gang of 14 or immigration and the war. What allowed John to go from all of those issues to being the nominee [is] just a sense of purpose and a belief in your position, and a core belief [that] this is the best for the country. And those beliefs are tested the most when you argue with your friends. The easiest thing in politics is to beat on your political foes, because there's a reward from your base. The hardest thing -- ask [Sen.] Joe Lieberman [I-Conn.] -- in politics is to tell that base of yours for many years, "I can't help you here." … (Interview 2).
In a campaign that needs all the laughs it can get, much of the mirth among [2008] Republican presidential nominee John McCain’s band of travelers is generated by his close friend, Sen. Lindsey Graham.
As often as not recently, Graham has been the warm-up act for McCain at campaign rallies in battleground states, and the South Carolina Republican comes out with laughers, like this one in talking about McCain’s wife, Cindy:
“She is classy, she is beautiful, she is smart, she owns a beer distributorship. For a Navy guy, John McCain has hit the mother lode.”
In Durango, Colorado, in an event on a high school football field, Graham pointed to his own lack of athletic prowess when he was growing up.
“You know, I played high school football for four years -- first time I’ve ever been on the field,” he said.
And when the crowd cheered him on in Zanesville, Ohio, he said: “I didn’t realize how big I was in Ohio. Yeah, I’ve gained 20 pounds on this campaign. I’m getting bigger every day.”
Graham is able to hang around McCain so much in the days leading up to Election Day November 4 because he is coasting along in his bid for a new six-year term against a weak Democratic opponent, Bob Conley.
So instead of campaigning for himself in South Carolina, Graham over the past week has been at McCain’s side at rallies in Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa and North Carolina.
Cindy McCain describes Graham as McCain’s best friend and McCain himself in the past has affectionately introduced him as “that little jerk” and teased him about his Southern drawl.
“He’s goofy,” said McCain senior adviser Nicolle Wallace. “He just lights up McCain’s spirit with his performance on the trail and his mood.”
In a campaign that is basically a family feud among three members of the clubby 100-member U.S. Senate -- McCain of Arizona versus Democrats Barack Obama of Illinois and Joe Biden of Delaware -- Graham is enjoying taking shots at his opponents on the other side of the aisle.
He takes special pleasure in skewering “Joe the Biden” for the loquacious Biden’s tendency to talk himself into trouble, such as his recent comment that Obama would be bound to face an international crisis early in his presidency, which gave McCain a new line of attack.
“He’s the sound-bite machine that keeps on giving,” Graham says. “Keep it up, Joe!”
And on Obama himself: “You’ve seen his book, ‘The Audacity of Hope?’ He’s got a sequel coming out: ‘The Times I Stood Up To The Left.’ It’s a short read.”
…
McCain had an ally in Graham when they tried to get Republicans to support an immigration deal in 2007 that triggered a conservative revolt and almost derailed McCain’s presidential bid.
“I have been hanging around this guy for about 10 years now,” Graham said. “I have been into every fight he’s got me involved in Washington, and I’ve got a few scars to show for it, but I wouldn’t have it any other way” (Holland 1-2).
By the 2008 campaign, the two [Graham and McCain] were inseparable. Graham found a role as the court jester who kept things light even when there seemed little to laugh about. He remained by the candidate’s side on election night. The following day, Graham stayed with the McCains at their ranch outside Sedona, Ariz.
A month later, Graham flew with McCain to the Chicago campaign headquarters of President-elect Obama to discuss issues like immigration and detainee policy and how the two of them might be able to work with the new administration. Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was there. Graham and Emanuel each served as their candidates’ negotiators for the presidential debates, and Graham recalled: “We were able to knock this thing out pretty quickly. And I really respected him because if he told me he’d do something, he would.” That day in Chicago, according to both men, Emanuel pulled Graham aside and expressed admiration for how he had stuck by his friend, especially during the bleakest moments. It became immediately apparent that the White House chief of staff and Graham would be doing business, with or without McCain.
Whenever Graham speaks fondly of other legislators, Ted Kennedy’s name invariably comes up. He admired the Massachusetts senator’s energy and passion, but above all his practicality. According to Graham, Kennedy claimed that, while working behind the scenes to garner support from fellow senators across the aisle, he would publicly lambaste the same Republicans for one reason or another, so that back home they would not be tarred as bedfellows of the liberal icon.
A similar element of kabuki theater attends Graham’s relationship with the Obama administration. …
Certain elements of Graham’s dance routine with the White House are available for public viewing. Graham has already signaled that he would be receptive to confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court this summer. First, however, he will extract his pound of flesh. “I want to make the case that she’s a liberal,” he told me. …
On other matters, Graham has unabashedly supported the Obama administration. He credits the president for his attentiveness to Pakistan, for sending more troops to Afghanistan and for recently declaring a moratorium on deep-water drilling while remaining open to future domestic oil exploration. These, of course, are among the issues on which Obama has disappointed his liberal supporters. I asked Graham if he felt that he had taken the full measure of the president. “No, I don’t,” he said. “I got comfortable with Bush. I’m not comfortable with Obama.”
… “some people, when it comes to the tough decisions, back away.” … (Draper 2).
So the immigration comprehensive bill was a big moment a couple years ago.
That's where [Sens.] Ted Kennedy [D-Mass.], Lindsey Graham, Jon Kyl [R-Ariz.] and Ken Salazar [D-Colo.], along with Secretary [of Commerce Carlos] Gutierrez and [Secretary of Homeland Security Michael] Chertoff sit in a room for about three months going over every line of a bill, giving and taking like you thought the ninth-grade civics class would be. It was a bill where the senators actually get involved. We probably had 30, 40 senators coming in and out of those meetings.
Sen. Obama was one of those senators. He'd come in at times and make a contribution. We were at the very last part of the negotiations. He shows up. He's not a regular participant, but he shows up at the end, and he's got three things he wants or two things he wants. Jon Kyl didn't want to give it to him; I did. It was some change; I can't remember what it was. But I wanted him in, because I know he's somebody that people pay attention to. We needed every vote we could get, and we needed all the people we could to push this ball, because immigration's tough. The left hated the bill because of the labor unions. Labor unions hated the temporary worker program. They didn't want a temporary worker program to allow outside people to come in and work. The right didn't like the path to citizenship, the ability of allowing people to come out of the shadows and have a legal status. …
So we get on the floor. You get some people doing the union bidding, trying to undo the temporary worker program. They reduce the numbers in half, but we could live with it, fix it in conference. So Sen. Obama started voting in a way to undercut the temporary worker program. I went to him at least once and said: "We can't do this. This will destroy the deal." …
Finally it all blew up. Not only had he started voting the wrong way to undo the deal, he offered an amendment himself that would have sunsetted the temporary worker program after five years. What do you go tell the people on your side, the business people who need access to labor, "Your program goes away after five years"? …
That just made me very, very mad. ... I thought instead of sticking to the deal, he gave in to pressure from the left, and the pressure from the left and right was enormous. So that did not sit well with me (Interview 4).
… Obama’s performance in 2008 left Graham impressed — “I thought this guy did a masterful job of beating Clinton, feinting to the left, coming back to the middle” — and hopeful that the new president would depart from the intransigence of the previous one. (“Bush made it hard for anybody to work with him,” Graham told me.) In Chicago, Obama and Graham agreed to stay in touch about the matter of detained suspected terrorists. Graham was therefore chagrined to read a couple of weeks later that Obama intended to close the Guantánamo Bay prison without having first established an alternative facility. Graham recalls telling Rahm Emanuel: “This is a mistake. You need to get people on board for why you should close it.”
…
Two weeks ago, I found Graham in his office contemplating a coming scheduled visit to the White House to explore potential areas of agreement on energy and climate legislation. To him, consensus building is a game of inches, and the meeting (which was later postponed) would likely amount to no more and no less than a positive increment. “I fully understand 70 to 80 percent of my [Republican] conference is going to reject any idea of putting a price on carbon anywhere,” he told me. For that matter, he said, “the environmental groups are great to deal with — but they think the planet’s gonna melt in five years. I don’t. I think carbon pollution, all things considered, is bad for human beings. But it’s not what I think of when I wake up in the morning. . . . I offer myself as a bridge, and I take a beating for that, and I get rewarded for that. It’s a business. Politically, it is who I am now. There’s no use for me to try to play another game” (Draper 5-6).
In years past, Graham’s deal-making forays typically featured his close friend, Senator John McCain of Arizona, as the front man. Nowadays McCain has shucked his maverick ways in order to court his state’s G.O.P. primary voters, while Graham’s reflexive displays of bipartisanship have made him something of a scourge among South Carolina Tea Partiers. Harry Kibler fingered Graham as major prey in Kibler’s “RINO hunt” (Republicans in Name Only). The South Carolina chapter of Resist.net warns constituents that Graham “is up to his old reach-across-the-aisle tricks again!” Among the conservative activists who have called for censuring Graham as a quisling of the right is the state’s G.O.P. gubernatorial nominee and Tea Party favorite, Nikki Haley.
“Everything I’m doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement’s at,” Graham said as Cato drove him to the city of Greenwood, where he was to give a commencement address at Lander University later that morning. …
In a previous conversation, Graham told me: “The problem with the Tea Party, I think it’s just unsustainable because they can never come up with a coherent vision for governing the country. It will die out.” Now he said, in a tone of casual lament: “We don’t have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats.” Chortling, he added, “Ronald Reagan would have a hard time getting elected as a Republican today.”
Graham is now accustomed to sporadic heckling and the occasional icy stare in his native state, where he was re-elected to a second term in 2008 by a 15-point margin. His give-and-take brand of conservatism has never been an obvious fit in blood-red South Carolina, and even more so during the past Tea-Party-agitated year. ...
The White House logs do not record visits paid by U.S. senators. According to his office’s records, however, Lindsey Graham has been to the West Wing 19 times since Barack Obama became president. When I asked the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, if any other Republican senator was so frequent a guest, he thought for a moment before responding, rather doubtfully, “Maybe Susan Collins.”
Emanuel went on to say: “He’s willing to work on more things than the others. Lindsey, to his credit, has a small-government vision that’s out of fashion with his party, which stands for no government. . . . He’s one of the last big voices to give that vision intellectual energy.”
…
[Graham characterized] the president of the United States as “a good role model” or “an American just as much as anybody else.” Graham made both comments on “Meet the Press” in March. His greater transgression, however, has been his willingness — even eagerness — to seek common ground with Democrats. For his sins, Glenn Beck termed the senator Obama Lite, while Rush Limbaugh labeled him Lindsey Grahamnesty. Less tame are the blogosphere monikers, like “Miss Lindsey,” that play off of Graham’s never-married status. During a South Carolina Tea Party rally this spring, one speaker created an uproar by postulating that Graham supported a guest-worker program out of fear that the Democrats might otherwise expose his homosexuality. (Graham smirked when I brought this up. “Like maybe I’m having a clandestine affair with Ricky Martin,” he said. “I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men — I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge — but I ain’t available. I ain’t gay. Sorry.”)
Graham feels a strong personal connection to a handful of issues. Saving Social Security from financial collapse by reforming its benefit structure is one: as a college student, he and his teenage sister depended on their recently deceased parents’ Social Security benefits. Additionally, devising a framework for where and how to adjudicate cases of suspected terrorism has natural appeal to Graham, who as a judge advocate general has served as a military lawyer for the past 25 years. Otherwise, it’s a mix of intellectual curiosity, statesmanship, opportunism and maybe even loneliness that compels Lindsey Graham — who admits, “I don’t have a life” — to thrust himself into the innermost core of American policy making.
…
“I think I’m where senators used to be,” Graham said one evening at a German restaurant on Capitol Hill. “I think I’m where they were before 24/7 news. It gets a little old after a while trying to explain yourself. I don’t think I’m overly complicated. I’m unique, but I’m not complicated.”
The senator — who stripped off his jacket and tie even before sitting down — leaned over his potato pancake, and his customarily glazed eyes widened just a bit. “My God, look what I’m involved in!” he said. “By default, if for no other reason. How do you close Gitmo without working with me now? How do you do immigration?” He added: “What if I walked away from climate change tomorrow? . . . You know, all politicians like to be thought of in their own mind as somebody special. I’m past that now. I’m a little worried. This is not healthy for the country. It’s really not.”
… A few days earlier, he told me that his party’s unwillingness to work with the Obama administration amounted to an “opportunity” for him to be the Hill’s deal-maker in chief, adding with a laugh, “I mean, I’m not having to push through people to get to the front of the line” (Draper 2-4).
Works cited:
Draper, Robert. “Lindsey Graham, This Year’s Maverick.” New York Times, July 1, 2010. Net. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/magazine/04graham-t.html
Holland, Steve. “McCain's Master of Mirth, Lindsey Graham.” Reuters, October 30, 2008. Net. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-politics-graham/mccains-master-of-mirth-lindsey-graham-idUSTRE49T6D720081030
“Interview: Sen. Lindsey Graham.” PBS, October 14, 2008. Net. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/choice2008/interviews/graham.html
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