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.

Can the candidate who authored this line - "I'm going to Washington to dismantle it" - lose? If he takes a groin shot...

With his 2007 book Crash Proof (Peter) Schiff proved himself a more authentic clairvoyant than Alan Greenspan, Art Laffer, or Nostradamus, correctly predicting not only the shortly-thereafter ensuing sudden economic collapse in uncanny detail, but also the ham-handed, meddlesome Big Government response that would exacerbate the crisis.

In CEO of the Sofa, P.J. O'Rourke wrote that he read Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village because he recognized "Neville Chamberlain made a famous mistake by not bringing a copy of Mein Kampf with him on the plane ride to Munich." Similarly, Crash Proof is the book you wish Ben Bernanke had taken in the car en route to testify before the Senate Banking Committee in 2007.

So dire is the situation, Schiff has decided to add to his busy schedule of writing financial bestsellers and guiding his Euro Pacific Capital fund a run for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination in Connecticut, a race in which, bizarrely, the man whose YouTube greatest hits includes the remarkable video "Peter Schiff Was Right" is considered an underdog against former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon, a woman now perhaps as well known for her willingness to spend $50 million of her own money to become a senator as she is for her ability to take a piledriver and nonchalance about shin to groin combat.

Blogger Mickey Kaus defies custom by disclosing bribes he would accept to drop his challenge to CA Sen. Barbara Boxer

In an obviously effective attempt to attract free attention to his hopeless primary campaign against incumbent Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, California's Mickey Kaus has just announced the three backroom bribes that he would accept from the Obama administration to drop his challenge.

The California primary is Tuesday.

The Obama administration in recent days has been embarrassed to have to defend its job offers to at least two rebel Democrats challenging incumbent Democratic senators in this ominous midterm election year -- Joe Sestak, who successfully dumped incumbent, newly discovered Democrat Arlen Specter, and Andrew Romanoff, who's challenging troubled Sen. Michael Bennet in Colorado.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs attempted to justify the employment buy-offs by painting them as routine political maneuvers and efforts to promote party unity.

Kaus, a pioneering political blogger, sees the bids differently:

"I always thought primary challenges were part of the democratic process, allowing a full airing of competing viewpoints and offering voters a choice. I'm challenging a three-term incumbent in order to provoke a debate over the misguided Democratic party dogma she reflexively embraces."

The candidate who claims to be no politician said he would accept no ordinary federal bureaucrat's job. However, he could be purchased by employment as:

--Head of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to push for an actual physical fence on the Mexico border to stop illegal immigrants and to end the "anointed incumbent...Boxer's obsessive talk of amnesty, sorry, 'a path to citizenship'" that actually acts as a powerful lure for even more illegal immigrants.

--Second, Kaus kindly offers, Obama could put him on the National Labor Relations Board so he could thwart "Big Labor's attempt to add to their dwindling memberships by avoiding secret ballots in union organizing drives."

--Finally, Kaus offered to accept an administration job offer to the Department of Education to write "a scathing report" on California teachers' unions and their deleterious impact on the state.