Bush 43 & McCain

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Hey Bill Clinton! This is the way to do it, not this way.

The Times writes that McCain is going to use Bush to raise money, as Bill is, but won’t use him for anything else. Which is how it should be. Reagan did the same for Bush Sr. and apparently Bush Jr. will be doing it this way for McCain.

Of course the writer had to put her spin on it:

But even as the consensus was that Mr. McCain needed to “stand in the sun” on his own, as one adviser put it, without the large shadow cast by Mr. Bush, left unsaid was the difficult calculus the McCain campaign faces: Using Mr. Bush enough to try to make the tough sell of Mr. McCain to conservatives but not so much that he will drive away the independents and some moderate Democrats that Mr. McCain is counting on in November.

What was said?

“What an incumbent president can do is help a new nominee with fund-raisers, maybe with unifying the party, maybe with getting out the vote in Republican areas,” said Charles Black, a top adviser to Mr. McCain and an outside adviser to the White House who has been part of every Republican presidential campaign since 1976. “But the important thing to remember is, the nominee is on their own. And no president, no matter how popular and effective politically, can carry somebody.”

Ed Gillespie, the White House counselor to Mr. Bush and the chairman of the Republican National Committee during Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign, echoed Mr. Black. “Senator McCain has his own identity,” Mr. Gillespie said in an interview, “and he’s going to be campaigning as John McCain and the things that John McCain believes in.”

Got to love these Times writers.

Left unsaid….give me a break.

The other news of the day was Bush endorsing McCain….a bit earlier then expected:

Former President George H.W. Bush endorsed John McCain today as the man best prepared to succeed his son, saying the Arizona senator has the “right values and experience to guide our nation forward.”

“No one is better prepared to lead our nation at these trying times than Senator John McCain,” the 41st president said at a news conference in Houston as McCain stood at his side.

The former president and McCain said Republicans need to draw on a broad base of voters to keep the White House.

“We as a party must unite and move forward and attract not only members of our own party but independents and so-called Reagan Democrats,” McCain said.

Ed Morrissey:

Usually, former presidents stay out of primary contests, but obviously Bush 41 wants to see an end to the divisiveness in the GOP. Having the establishment line up with McCain provides a gentle prod to Huckabee.

It shouldn’t be so gentle actually. The man is done, get out of the way and let the Republican establishment get cooking on this campaign while Hillary and Obama slug it out.

I mean, as Daniel Gilgoff writes, Huckabees supporters share no small blame for allowing McCain to get the nomination.

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Somehow Bush Sr. endorsing McCain doesn’t stoke the conservative right. I don’t know why.

Amy – Somehow Bush Sr. endorsing McCain doesn’t stoke the conservative right. I don’t know why.

Amy, you or I could be running for president, and both of us wouldn’t measure up the “ideological standard.”