Earlier this year, right-wing luminary Paul Weyrich announced that, if John McCain secured the Republican presidential nomination, he’d be voting for a third party candidate:
Paul M. Weyrich, national chairman of Sixty Votes Coalition PAC, says if the November choice is between Hillary Clinton and McCain, he would then look for a third party candidate whom he could back. This is no small matter. Weyrich has only one vote like the rest of us, but many conservatives would at least take his views into consideration when making up their own minds before casting their ballots.
“I will not vote for him [McCain],” Weyrich told this column in an interview. “I can’t” … Weyrich could live with other prospective GOP nominees — in a couple of cases, hopefully gaining some concessions to the conservative position. But McCain — never.
It was no surprise that Weyrich refused to support McCain, considering that the two have a long history of mutual animosity:
Weyrich told National Journal earlier this year that he questioned whether McCain had the temperament to be commander in chief because he was too hot-headed.
McCain has been equally scathing. “Weyrich possesses the attributes of a Dickensian villain,” he wrote in his 2002 book, Worth the Fighting For. “Corpulent and dyspeptic, his mouth set in a perpetual sneer as if life in general were an unpleasant experience, he is the embodiment of the caricature often used to unfairly malign all religious conservatives.” McCain added: “I like to think I know a pompous, self-serving son of a bitch when I see one.”
But, of course, like just about every other right-wing leader who once declared McCain utterly unacceptable, Weyrich has changed his tune:
They only started speaking again after nineteen years. Both have been quite open in saying why they held one another in “minimum high regard.” Their animosity toward each other is well known in national political circles.
But Paul Weyrich, one of the godfathers of the modern conservative movement, put all of that aside last week when he strongly endorsed John McCain for President.
And how did this come about? Because McCain once again realized it suited his political interest to grovel:
After he nailed down the Republican nomination, Weyrich [said], the Arizonan “came to my office to see me. We talked things over and he asked for my support.”
Apparently McCain decided that what his campaign desperately needed was the support of at least one more “corpulent and dyspeptic … pompous, self-serving son of a bitch.”
