McCain’s missed votes on Iraq trigger Reid rebuke

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is the only presidential candidate in Congress to have missed a major vote on the Iraq war this year, and his absences are not sitting well with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

Liz Oxhorn, a spokeswoman for Reid, told The Hill, “Sen. McCain has spent considerable time defending the president on Iraq and catering to the Republican base on immigration, but has only managed to show up for four of the last 14 Iraq votes and parachute into [yesterday’s] immigration press conference at the last minute. Who is the real John McCain?”

{mosads}McCain’s campaign quickly counterattacked. Danny Diaz, spokesman for McCain, said, “John McCain has continued to stand up for what he believes: victory in Iraq and improved protection of our nation through comprehensive immigration reform. It is unfortunate that the Senate majority leader is more focused on partisan attacks than solving the serious problems confronting our nation.”

The Reid-McCain relationship appears to have soured significantly since the last presidential campaign. Weeks before the 2004 elections, Reid and McCain sat together at ringside during a championship bout between Bernard Hopkins and Oscar De La Hoya in Las Vegas.

Responding to criticism of his missed votes, McCain has repeatedly criticized Senate Democratic leaders of playing politics with Iraq.

While McCain has missed four of 14 Senate roll calls on the war this year, other presidential candidates have managed their schedules around the high-profile votes.

Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Joseph Biden (D-Del.), Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) voted on each of the 14 measures.

In the House, on three major votes dealing with the troop surge and supplemental funding for the war, the four announced presidential candidates voted every time.

Reps. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), Ron Paul (R-Texas) and Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) registered their votes on all three occasions.

 McCain’s campaign said the rigorous travel schedule necessary when running for the White House makes it extremely difficult to be voting all the time in Washington.

 “Sen. McCain has traveled the country speaking to the importance of winning in Iraq and clearly stated that we must give the new strategy a chance to succeed because the consequences of failure would be too damaging to our nation,” Diaz said.
“Regrettably, it is impossible for a presidential candidate to avoid missing votes, but Sen. McCain has not missed a vote where his vote would have affected the outcome, and he will make every effort to be in the Senate on the occasions when it would.”

The campaign declined to comment on the fact that all the other candidates have not missed major votes on Iraq.
 Iraq has arguably become the central issue of McCain’s campaign, as he has been the most outspoken in his defense of the recent troop surge.

The senator has been critical of the early management of the war and of the performance of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Lawmakers running for president have seemingly always battled the balance between campaigning and legislating.

In mid-February, Reid scheduled a last-minute vote for the Saturday before the Presidents Day recess on an Iraq resolution. 

The announcement sent the presidential campaigns scrambling to adjust their schedules, as every candidate had plans to be in other states campaigning.

Clinton, for example, was scheduled to be in New Hampshire that Saturday. She made the trip, campaigned in the morning, flew back to Washington to vote in the afternoon then got right back on a plane and flew back to the Granite State.

McCain was scheduled to be in Iowa, and he did not change his travel plans.

At the time, Reid spokesman Jim Manley said the majority leader would not take senators’ campaign schedules into account when scheduling votes “any more or less than any of the other senators.”