Candidate McCain may come calling

THE BEST-KNOWN appearance by a Bull Moose here in recent years came in 2000, as Sen. John McCain brought his "straight-talk express" to Seattle and then took it across the water to Bremerton.

It was a blast from a reformist Republican past, with McCain vowing to clean up corruption in campaign financing and getting "Green" credentials from Dan Evans, Ralph Munro and Teddy Roosevelt's granddaughter, Edith Derby Roosevelt Williams.

A very different candidate McCain, having made at least an uneasy peace with the Republican right, is now looking at the electoral map ... and apparently tempted to make a run at Washington's electoral votes.

McCain is one White House hopeful not likely to use Boeing's Everett assembly plant as a photo backdrop.

As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain used his Senate clout to investigate and kill a deal that would have converted Boeing 767 aircraft for use as Air Force tankers.

A senior Air Force official and a top Boeing executive later served jail sentences, and Boeing's chairman retired.

"I intervened in a process that was clearly corrupt. That's why people went to jail," McCain shot back to a reporter's joke on a Seattle visit.

Sure it was a corrupt deal, but it was our corrupt deal.

McCain has made a career of excoriating the effect of Washington, D.C., influence merchants. Still, they've found sinecures high in his campaign. Three top campaign brass come from the Loeffler Group, named for a former Texas congressman turned lobbyist.

Loeffler received $200,000 in 2007 from the European Aeronautic Defense and Space Co., which beat out Boeing in the subsequent competition to build the Air Force tanker.

The state Democratic Party has tried to depict McCain as the man from EADS. It's guilt by association but McCain would be wise not to have Loeffler on the campaign plane when it lands at Boeing Field.

On other fronts, to use words immortalized by Bette Davis, fasten your seat belts!

Greens in the Democrats' pocket will try to demean him, but McCain forced the first real Senate vote on capping carbon emissions into the atmosphere. The Commerce Committee held real hearings on global warming, with real experts, at a time when the Bush administration was stifling scientists and censoring their findings.

McCain and presidential rival Hillary Clinton led a 2005 Senate trip that examined the effect of global warming on the Arctic, from the shrinking ice pack to beach erosion at villages to beetle infestations killing millions of acres of forests.

Since then, however, "Captain Climate" has been attuned to which way the winds blow in the Republican Party.

He forced a torture ban on President Bush, only to let the president subvert it with signing language. In February of this year, he voted against a ban on waterboarding, putting hoods on prisoners or subjecting them to mock executions.

He did not want to "tie the CIA to the Army Field Manual," McCain explained. Just last November, however, McCain told a candidates debate about his recent visit to a prison in Iraq.

"The Army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn't think they need to do anything else. My friends, that is what America is all about," he said.

McCain is hot-tempered, even toward colleagues. At a 1999 GOP caucus, he erupted at Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, reportedly saying, "Only a (bleep)hole would put together a budget like this."

He repeatedly clashed with former Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., on issues ranging from tribal sovereignty on Indian reservations to earmarks on appropriations to the 2000 presidential primary. (Gorton was a big Bush man.)

McCain was one GOP senator not to sign a petition urging Gorton's nomination to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Still, this year, Gorton signed on early as an endorser of McCain's presidential campaign.

And there is the war. On the one hand, the shores of Puget Sound serve as home to a multiplicity of Navy bases ... and thousands of military retirees who make for a natural McCain constituency.

Outside those bases, Washington has a big, vocal peace movement that has remained vital from Vietnam to Iraq.

McCain is a warrior whose predictions have echoed those of the White House. Like Dick Cheney, he predicted in the spring of 2003 that "the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators." Three weeks before President Bush's famous "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier speech, McCain was declaring, "It's clear the end is very much in sight."

He has backed an indefinite U.S. military presence in Iraq. He has lately proposed that the United States expel Russia and exclude China from the annual G8 summit of major world powers.

And McCain has rattled sabers toward Iraq's next-door neighbor, most famously with his "Bomb Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran" parody of an old Beach Boys tune.

"There's only one thing worse than the United States exercising the military option," McCain told CNN in 2006. "That is a nuclear-armed Iran."

When he calls here, McCain should be asked the question: Are those our only two options?

SEATTLEPI.COM

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