The big spending shifter from Arizona fools them one more time

John McCain holds a comfortable lead in the contentious Arizona Republican Senate primary, according to the most recent public polling, making him the strong favorite against former Rep. J.D. Hayworth on Tuesday.

But it’s been a costly road to a 5th term for the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, and the experience is likely to leave a lasting and unsightly stain on his legacy.

It’s not just the $20 million he’s spent already this election or the scorched earth campaign that he’s run. Rather, it’s the choices he’s made and the positions he’s embraced—and what it reveals about him—that could make for a complicated final chapter in his political biography.

Once the sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy—a stance that hurt him with conservatives—McCain moved in a different direction this year. He switched his emphasis this summer to border security, embraced the Arizona’s controversial hardline immigration law and, in an ad, called on the federal government to “complete the danged fence”—three years after dismissing the notion of a border fence in a Vanity Fair article headlined, “Prisoner of Conscience.”

Four years ago, McCain also told students he supported repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bans gays from serving openly in the military. But in May, the former war hero and Navy POW promised to filibuster any bill including that change that landed on the Senate floor.

He sidestepped the climate change debate this year despite once being a Senate leader on the issue and he’s even distanced himself from the term that once seemed central to his political brand—his “maverick” trademark.

Hayworth, the primary election opponent McCain has spent a small fortune pummeling as inept, corrupt and even stupid, has seized on the apparent contradictions.

“Mr. campaign finance reform . . . the guy who used to lecture us about the evils of money . . . thinks he’s going to buy off Arizona,” Hayworth told POLITICO. “Maybe it’ll work. Hey, they spent $20 million.”

Former advisers to McCain, who declined an interview for this story through a spokesman, were wary of publicly offering their thoughts on how this smashmouth primary campaign—potentially the last for the 73-year–old senator—has changed the former captain of the “Straight Talk Express.”

It’s widely assumed McCain’s move to the right is rooted in political expediency—the Arizona Republican primary electorate is conservative and to win renomination, McCain needed to convince those voters of his bona fides.

While McCain heads into Tuesday’s contest holding a steady double-digit polling advantage, his supporters are quick to point out that there was a time this race was not a slam dunk.

In November 2009, a Rasmussen Reports survey showed the four-term senator clinging to just a two-percentage-point lead over Hayworth, who had not even yet entered the race. In that same survey, 61 percent of Arizona Republicans said they felt McCain had lost touch with those in his own party. Even five months later in April, just a third of primary voters viewed McCain “very favorably,” while a staggering 85 percent said gaining control of the border was more important than legalizing the status of immigrants here illegally.

Hayworth hammers McCain with his own words

In Worth the Fighting For, his 2002 memoir, Sen. John McCain explains why he supported South Carolina’s right to fly the Confederate flag during the 2000 presidential primary. “I didn’t want to do this,” he writes. “But I could tell from the desperate looks of my staff that we had an enormous problem. And that it could come down to lying or losing. I chose lying.”

I chose lying. Those three words are haunting McCain this week. J.D Hayworth, McCain’s chief opponent in Arizona’s Aug. 24 GOP Senate primary, has clipped the line from McCain’s audiobook recording and framed his latest television ad around it. In the spot, Hayworth hammers McCain on immigration:

Barely one-third like McCain's performance, but he's headed for another win

Sen. John McCain got some good and bad news in a new Public Policy Polling survey of the Arizona Senate race (April 23-25, 813 RV, MoE +/- 3.4%). The longtime incumbent polls far better against a Democrat than does his GOP primary opponent, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth.

However, at 34% McCain's job approval rating is 11 points lower than Obama's. Less than 50% of Republicans approve of McCain's job performance, as do only 28% of independents.

With Tucson City Councilman Rodney Glassman (D) unknown to most of the state, McCain bests him in a hypothetical matchup by 16 points while Glassman holds a 3-point lead over Hayworth.

McCain 49 - Glassman 33 - Und 18

Hayworth 39 - Glassman 42 - Und 19

RCP currently classifies the race as Safe Republican.

Rancher's murder in Texas a flash point for McCain

Just a few short hours after a helicopter crew spotted the body of southern Arizona cattle rancher Robert Krentz slumped in his all-terrain vehicle on March 27, the unsolved murder became a flash point for the increasingly close Arizona Republican Senate primary election between incumbent Sen. John McCain, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, and his militarize-the-border opponent, J.D. Hayworth, a former Arizona congressman, TV weatherman, and conservative radio talk-show host.

Although the Cochise County Sheriff’s Department, which is investigating the killing, refuses to speculate on the nationality or sex of the unknown person who shot Krentz and his dog (which was later euthanized), many in Arizona have already made up their minds that either a Mexican drug cartel thug or an undocumented immigrant killed the rancher. This is due in part to the sheriff’s revelation that Krentz’s last garbled radio message to his brother included the words illegal alien and hurt, and partly due to the fact that trackers followed footprints for about 20 miles from the Krentz murder scene to the Mexican border.

Hayworth adviser Chris Simcox says that McCain, the Bush and Obama administrations, and anyone else who supports “amnesty” for “illegal aliens” can be held responsible for Krentz’s death because amnesty advocates don’t support secure borders.

J.D. Hayworth pledges two-term limit as senator

"No disrespect intended toward John, but it's obvious that he's just been in Washington too long and gotten too comfortable with the Washington establishment. It's time for him to come home and in that spirit, I pledge to only serve two consecutive six-year terms in the United States Senate. A total of 12 years, then it will be my time to leave the Senate to be succeeded by another citizen."

So said J.D. Hayworth, the reliable conservative who is challenging seldom-conservative John McCain in Arizona's Republican senatorial primary.

Coincidence? Or did he read the RightFieldLine's proposal this week for "an amendment to the U. S. Constitution setting term limits for senators and representatives. In the meantime, sharply lower retirement pay after two terms for senators and six terms for representatives."

At this pace, the revolution may not take as long as skeptics have suggested.

His signature legislation shredded by the Supreme Court, McCain's favorability down to 40%

PHOENIX — Defeated just two years ago as the Republican presidential candidate and with his bonafides as a true conservative again being challenged, John McCain finds himself in a struggle to get even his party's nomination for another term in the Senate.

Many conservatives and Tea Party activists are lining up behind Republican challenger and former talk radio host J.D. Hayworth, reflecting a rising tide of voter frustration with incumbent politicians. Only 40 percent of Arizonans have a favorable view of McCain's job performance.