In today’s CQ Weekly, I have a story about how John McCain is building his campaign’s Hill outreach operation. But one of the keys to that operation, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, is in a bit of a pickle.
As one of McCain’s closest friends and allies in the Senate, Graham has been serving as an unofficial liaison between the campaign and his Senate colleagues, answering questions and fielding concerns.
And as a McCain surrogate, Graham will be called upon to bash his Democratic Senate colleagues, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, because that’s what always happens in presidential campaigns.
Yet for Graham, Clinton isn’t just some random Democratic punching bag. They’ve actually worked together, co-sponsoring the 2004 law that allows National Guard and reserve members to use the military’s health care system, regardless of whether or not they are deployed. Clinton mentions the law all the time on the campaign trail as one of her best accomplishments in the Senate.
So Graham has had to decide where to set the boundaries on how hard he’ll attack Clinton, if she becomes the Democratic nominee. He says he has come up with a simple rule of thumb: Stay away from personal attacks. Stick to the issues.
“There are lots of people here who I like. That doesn’t mean I want them to be president,” Graham said last week. “I like Russ Feingold. That doesn’t mean I want him to be president, and I’m sure he’d say the same thing about me.”
“I don’t think I’m doing Senator McCain or the country any good by getting into personal differences,” said Graham. “The differences between Senator McCain and Senators Clinton and Obama are real, they’re substantive, they’re meaningful. That’s enough.”
Sure enough, Graham hasn’t been shy about pounding away at those issues – particularly the Iraq war, one issue where Graham and Clinton don’t exactly see eye-to-eye. At the Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the war two weeks ago, without mentioning any Democratic candidate by name, Graham tried to get Gen. David H. Petraeus to talk about the consequences of pulling one brigade out of Iraq every month. (Petraeus wouldn’t bite.)
Graham hasn’t been above singling out Clinton by name, either. “To Senator Clinton, who says the surge is a failure, I can’t imagine that statement having much credibility given the actual facts. That’s a political statement,” Graham said at a press conference at the Capitol two weeks ago.
Nothing personal, of course.
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