Beyond the Dome

Did you think John McCain might be running out of cards to play? Hardly. This morning, he found a new surrogate: a former senator from Illinois, and another one of those Republican mavericks, who just happens to be the guy Barack Obama replaced in the Senate.

Peter G. Fitzgerald held a conference call a little while ago to discuss his experiences with Obama, with whom he served for two years in the Illinois Senate before he was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1998. You can probably guess where this is going: Fitzgerald says Obama wasn’t much of a boat-rocker when they worked together, and that McCain did much more to challenge powerful party leaders and special interests.

“For Senator Obama, reform and nonpartisanship is something to campaign on, but it’s not something he actually does,” said Fitzgerald. Even the ethics overhaul Obama worked on in his second year as a state senator, Fitzgerald said, “passed with little or no opposition.” (In fact, it passed the Illinois Senate 52-4, according to media reports at the time, but the majority Republicans did try — unsuccessfully — to prevent it from reaching the House floor.)

“I do not see him as a reformer,” Fitzgerald said. By contrast, McCain has had a “lengthy” career fighting waste and corruption, Fitzgerald said. He cited their work together in stopping a plan for the Pentagon to lease 100 airborne tankers from the Boeing Co. — rather than simply buying them — and McCain’s investigation of Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff as chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

It’s not too surprising that Fitzgerald would speak up for his friend McCain, since Fitzgerald may have been one of the few Senate Republicans who could rival McCain in the number of enemies made within his party.

He clashed with then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, also of Illinois, over funding for an Abraham Lincoln Library in Springfield and openly criticized the scandals of former Illinois Gov. George Ryan. He also sided with McCain on key issues, becoming one of the few Senate Republicans to vote for the 2002 campaign finance overhaul.

But there may be another reason Fitzgerald was willing to jump into the campaign now. Although he called Obama “very intelligent and hardworking” and insisted that “I respect him,” the two would have been rivals for the Senate seat in 2004 if Fitzgerald hadn’t decided not to seek re-election.

In fact, before Fitzgerald took himself out of the race in April 2003, Obama considered him vulnerable and was actively running against him. “Four years ago, Peter Fitzgerald bought himself a Senate seat,” Obama said when he announced his candidacy in January 2003. “And he’s betrayed Illinois ever since. He’s cast votes for Trojan horse tax plans and misguided budgets that jeopardize Social Security and pension benefits.”

Chances are, Fitzgerald heard about that speech.