McCain: Meet Donald Diamond
Posted: Tuesday, April 22, 2008 9:10 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
2008, McCain
The New York Times runs this front-page article: “Donald R. Diamond, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer, was racing to snap up a stretch of virgin California coast freed by the closing of an Army base a decade ago when he turned to an old friend, Senator John McCain. When Mr. Diamond wanted to buy land at the base, Fort Ord, Mr. McCain assigned an aide who set up a meeting at the Pentagon and later stepped in again to help speed up the sale, according to people involved and a deposition Mr. Diamond gave for a related lawsuit. When he appealed to a nearby city for the right to develop other property at the former base, Mr. Diamond submitted Mr. McCain’s endorsement as ‘a close personal friend.’”
More: “For Mr. McCain, the Arizona Republican who has staked two presidential campaigns on pledges to avoid even the appearance of dispensing an official favor for a donor, Mr. Diamond is the kind of friend who can pose a test. A longtime political patron, Mr. Diamond is one of the elite fund-raisers Mr. McCain’s current presidential campaign calls Innovators, having raised more than $250,000 so far.”
And: “A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, Jill Hazelbaker, said the senator, now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, ‘had done nothing for Mr. Diamond that he would not do for any other Arizona citizen.’”
Meanwhile, this is the exact type of lead -- via the LA Times -- the McCain camp is looking for this week. “It was an unlikely setting for Republican presidential hopeful John McCain to campaign in Monday: the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where black protesters were beaten in a 1965 march for voting rights. McCain joined hands later with black women who sang gospel spirituals to him as they rode a ferry across the muddy Alabama River near Gee's Bend, a community famous for its quilts and for its role in the civil rights struggle. ‘Ninety years old and I never thought I'd see this,’ quilt maker Nettie Young said. ‘Republicans don't come to this bend.’”
“McCain will tell an economically depressed city in Ohio on Tuesday that it can rebound just like his once struggling campaign came back from the dead. ‘Sometimes you get a second chance, and opportunity turns back your way,’ McCain will say in Youngstown, Ohio. ‘And when it does, we are stronger and readier because of all that we had to overcome.’”
The Washington Post’s Balz: “McCain has had the general- election field largely to himself the past month. He has effectively consolidated the party establishment and tamped down talk that the base doesn't like him (although he may not have solved that problem). He has done a biographical tour, embarked yesterday on a campaign swing to show his openness to minority voters, and has tackled economic issues. Republicans are cautiously optimistic that McCain's campaign is doing what it should. They say he is wisely making organizational changes for the fall, that his economic message has solidified the party's base and that he has appeared as a grown-up amid squabbling by Democrats.
“‘He knows that his key to victory is building a coalition on top of a Republican base that includes conservative Democrats and Independents who are drawn to his bipartisan credentials," wrote Kevin Madden, who was press secretary in Mitt Romney's presidential campaign. Democrats think he is squandering this period. If he loses, they say, he will regret not putting more distance between himself and President Bush now and not taking over center ground more aggressively before Obama or Clinton can move back to the middle after their left-leaning nomination battle.”
“Privately, a number of Republicans agree. Some fear that neither McCain nor the Republican National Committee is doing enough to overcome the Democrats' energy and financial resources, and look good now primarily because Obama and Clinton are preoccupied with each other. ‘After their race is over, their winner will get a bump in the polls,’ a GOP strategist wrote. ‘The McCain campaign's ability to respond to that will be their first real test of the general.’”
