A couple of months ago, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, one of John McCain’s conservative Republican colleagues and a man who’s worked with McCain for years, raised serious doubts about McCain’s temperament. “The thought of him being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Cochran said. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”<\/p>\n
Cochran’s hardly alone. A wide variety<\/a> of Republicans have expressed concerns about McCain’s temperament for years, and worries about his temper have even led some military officials to express their concerns<\/a> about his disposition publicly.<\/p>\n And yet, this has been an issue that’s gone largely unreported over the course of the campaign. I was delighted, therefore, to see the Washington Post’s front-page story<\/a> on McCain’s “volcanic temper” today. Many of the anecdotes are familiar, but a few are new to me. For example, I hadn’t heard about how he treated state GOP officials the night he was elected to the Senate.<\/p>\n A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona’s Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening’s celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler’s chest.<\/p>\n “I told you we needed a stage,” he screamed, according to Hinz. “You incompetent little [expletive]. When I tell you to do something, you do it.”<\/p>\n Hinz recalls intervening, placing his 6-foot-6 frame between the senator-elect and the young volunteer. “John, this is not the time or place for this,” Hinz remembers saying to McCain, who fumed that he hadn’t been seen clearly by television viewers. Hinz recollects finally telling McCain: “John, look, I’ll follow you out on stage myself next time. I’ll make sure everywhere you go there is a milk crate for you to stand on. But this is enough.”<\/p>\n McCain spun around on his heels and left. He did not talk to Hinz again for several years.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Reading the well-documented WaPo article, we see a senator who not only flies off the handle, but whose rage leads him to be spiteful, petty, and borderline violent. During the early 1990s, McCain telephoned the office of Tom Freestone, a governmental official little known outside Arizona’s Maricopa County. McCain had an unusual request. He wanted Freestone, then chairman of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, to reject a job applicant named Karen S. Johnson, whose last governmental position had been in the office of a former Arizona governor and who had just interviewed for a position as an aide in Freestone’s office.<\/p>\n According to two employees in the office, McCain told Freestone that the applicant’s past political associations left her carrying unflattering baggage.<\/p>\n The pair of Freestone staffers thought it odd that a U.S. senator would even know that Johnson had applied for a job in their office, let alone that he had taken time out of his workday to pick up a phone and weigh in on a staffing matter so removed from the locus of Washington power. But McCain’s disenchantment with Johnson was personal: A few years earlier, he had an angry exchange with her while she was the secretary for Republican Arizona Gov. Evan Meacham.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …and this one.<\/p>\n In 1994, McCain tried to stop a primary challenge to the state’s Republican governor, J. Fife Symington III, by telephoning his opponent, Barbara Barrett, the well-heeled spouse of a telecommunications executive, and warning of unspecified “consequences” should she reject his advice to drop out of the race. Barrett stayed in. At that year’s state Republican convention, McCain confronted Sandra Dowling, the Maricopa County school superintendent and, according to witnesses, angrily accused her of helping to persuade Barrett to enter the race.<\/p>\n “You better get [Barrett] out or I’ll destroy you,” a witness claims that McCain shouted at her. Dowling responded that if McCain couldn’t respect her right to support whomever she chose, that he “should get the hell out of the Senate.” McCain shouted an obscenity at her, and Dowling howled one back.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n On top of all of this, he nearly came to blows with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) of Iowa and Sen. Richard Shelby (R) of Alabama; he tried to intimidate former Sen. Bob Smith (R) of New Hampshire; and he’s screamed obscenities at everyone from Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas to Sen. Pete Domenici (R) of New Mexico. He even explodes in international settings<\/a>.<\/p>\n Is this really<\/i> the character trait the U.S. needs in a leader during a war? In the event of a crisis, do we want a leader known for his rage-induced tirades and unstable temperament?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A couple of months ago, Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi, one of John McCain’s conservative Republican colleagues and a man who’s worked with McCain for years, raised serious doubts about McCain’s temperament. “The thought of him being president sends a cold chill down my spine,” Cochran said. “He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15272"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15272\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nThere was this bizarre anecdote…<\/p>\n