There was no word of it on his official website. Not a peep on Facebook. Mysteriously, news reports of a John McCain town hall on Tuesday made their way into Republican circles and conservative corners.
Few of them knew about it beforehand and the few that were aware were “friendlies” to the McCain camp, which meant that the Tucson town hall was small. These days the only large crowd that might show up for a McCain event in Southern Arizona would be carrying picket signs demanding his resignation.
The “staged” town hall included mostly democrats and long time establishment republicans. The few grassroots republicans and conservative independents were ignored.
“I was at the McCain Town Hall meeting yesterday and every question was geared to be answered with great political comfort. There were questions that everybody knew the answers to, fake smiles and complicated rhetoric that said nothing,” said one grassroots republican. “I was standing up in the front row with my hand up right from the git go and his highness kept avoiding me.”
“Republicans do not want to hear from conservatives. This was a sham,” said James T. Harris, a Tucson radio show host. “McCain never intended to include the town in his town hall. It was a photo op and the mainstream media and a handful of democrats agreed to play along. This guy knows that the mainstream media will cooperate with him in this charade.”
Harris opened up his phone lines on his Wednesday show to hear from people who had been in attendance. For the most part, republicans called in to say that they follow politics closely, and they had no idea McCain was going to host a public forum. Another said that he had been calling McCain’s office to see when the senator would be in town for the summer recess and was told that he would need to watch the news for that information.
About 100 people packed the small hall to hear the senator opine for about an hour. According to attendees, it appeared as if gun rights opponents were invited to offer their praise of the senator’s unpopular position on gun control. To ensure maximum effect, the first comment came from the father of young Christina–Taylor Green. Taylor Green was shot and killed by madman Jared Laughner in his attack on former congresswoman Gabriele Giffords. “Thank you, first of all, for all of your support. Since we lost Christina, you were right there with us.”
Although McCain staged the event on Tucson’s heavily Hispanic south side, according to residents, he ignored them. A Conservative Latino republican described McCain as trying to avoid eye contact so that “he didn’t have to talk to you.”
This would not be the first time a McCain event was ‘staged’.
Some may harken back to October of 2010 when John McCain appeared at Hi Corbett Field to address the audience at a Tucson Tea Party event. Many, if not most, in attendance were not from the Tucson area as they were not familiar to those attending who had been very active in the Southern Arizona conservative movement. In fact, many of the ‘regular’ Tucson crowd did not appear for the event when it was announced just a few weeks before that McCain would be gracing the stage. Interestingly, when it was time for McCain to speak, he was accompanied onto the field by the very popular Sheriff Paul Babeu and Harris in an effort to ward off any chance of the audience expressing their displeasure of McCain.
Organizers had come to Harris immediately before McCain’s speech and advised Harris, who was at the time a weekend radio host in Wisconsin, that McCain was not popular with Southern Arizona’s conservatives. “They believed that the crowd would boo Senator McCain, so they implored The Beautiful Man to provide cover,” recalls Harris, who then facilitated McCain’s appearance.
After McCain delivered his message, most of the audience stood up and left when he exited the field leaving the true conservatives in the stands awaiting to hear from an authentic conservative voice, Tammy Bruce, who was the keynote speaker.
It is not surprising that many who left after McCain’s appearance went directly to a bus.
