‘The Double-Talk Express’ (Hayworth/McCain)

Washington, D.C. — Unlike most politicians at CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference

, former GOP congressman J. D. Hayworth roams the bowels of the Marriott Wardman hotel alone — no phalanx of aides, no fuss. Yet his sun-flecked face is ubiquitous. One minute he’s in a windowless conference room introducing Border War, his illegal-immigration documentary, to a group of activists sipping cheap coffee. Then his baritone laugh rumbles from a mezzanine corner as he holds court with some College Republicans. A few minutes later, the former drive-time star of KFYI-AM 550 in Phoenix strolls past a trio of tea-partiers in tri-corner hats to hustle down an escalator toward “radio row” for a slew of interviews. Before long, Hayworth zooms by again for more walking, talking, and grinning. And everywhere he goes, the salutation is the same: “Hey, J. D.!”

For these conservatives, Hayworth is an old friend, and welcomed like one — most of the time. While CPAC didn’t give him a keynote speaking slot in the main ballroom, in the hallways, at least, he’s almost as popular as Marco Rubio. Grandpas in Nixon pins, skinny college girls with lattes, you name it — they all stop to pat Hayworth’s back or tug at his sleeve, urging him on in his Senate primary battle with Arizona’s longtime Republican senator John McCain, the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee. Whether this right-wing affection will enable Hayworth to topple McCain and escape some of his own skeletons — past and present — remains to be seen.

Hayworth, 51 years old, officially announced his candidacy last Monday, but he’s been buzzing about it for months and thinking about this kind of upstart run for years. “A couple of things happened,” he tells National Review Online. “When I first went on the radio, I watched as Senator McCain pushed hard to pass the ill-fated amnesty bill of 2007, and the e-mails started coming in. Then, during the presidential campaign, more came. This year, more and more people asked me run, but it was in September, when Rasmussen came out with a poll, when things really started to click. That poll found that 61 percent of Arizona Republicans do not think that McCain shares their values or outlook. The e-mails soon after reached incredible proportions.”

One e-mail in particular stuck with Hayworth. “I got a note from a young officer in a combat zone, a young man I had appointed to a service academy. He said he was putting himself on the line for our constitutional system and values, and challenged me, asking me if I would get in the arena to ‘give him a choice, a chance to elect a conservative.’ That hit me with special poignancy, and was really the moment I got off the dime. Then, when John started siccing his lawyers on me and my employer — and, of course, after consulting with my family — I decided to do it. I don’t want to overstate this, but the drumbeat of e-mails was important, as well as the intimidation efforts coming from McCain about whether it was appropriate for me to be on the radio while thinking about running for office — the kind of tactic that doesn’t work with a guy like me.”

Unsurprisingly, Hayworth’s backroom panel appearance at CPAC was a little raw. He spent most of his allotted five minutes railing against Team McCain’s Federal Election Commission complaints with Randy Pullen, Arizona’s GOP chairman, looking on. The panel’s title: “They Want Us to Shut Up: Saving Freedom and the First Amendment.” Finding the right balance between his personal antagonism toward McCain and his policy qualms with the senator is still a work in progress. (CPAC attendees, for what it’s worth, appeared to nod along much more with the latter.)

Nevertheless, Hayworth stresses that his run isn’t just about being anti-McCain. His time out of office, and on radio, he says, has given him the chance to develop his arguments and prepare for the onslaught.

-SNIP-

McCain, 73 years old and looking to win his fifth term in the upper chamber, is taking Hayworth’s bid seriously: He’s already shelled out $2.5 million to cast himself as the race’s “true” conservative. He’s also bringing out the big guns: Sen. Scott Brown (R., Mass.), Sarah Palin, Steve Forbes, and Mitt Romney have all expressed their support or pledged to stump. Hayworth has had but one endorsement victory, and a qualified one at that: Sen. Jim DeMint (R., S.C.) has decided to stay “neutral.”

While Arizona won’t hold its primary until late August, and a Rasmussen poll shows him lagging 22 points behind McCain, Hayworth is convinced that he’s the one with momentum. “John McCain is vulnerable on everything,” he says. “He should rename his bus the double-talk express. He has flip-flopped more than John Kerry. Everyone watching this race knows that I’m the guy who’s the conservatives’ conservative here. I’m the guy who cut taxes on the Ways and Means Committee. John, well, he’s running a campaign of conservative conversion. It’s just sad and predictable. Yet he doesn’t realize that campaigning as a conservative only to legislate like a liberal won’t work anymore.”

Hayworth rolls his eyes when he hears all of McCain’s charges against him, from allegations of corruption to putdowns of Hayworth’s position on President Obama’s birth certificate. “Look, John has been an honorable man in the past, and I thank him for his service, but he must be getting some very bad advice,” Hayworth says. “He’s showing his desperation, early. Believe me, conservatives are noticing that he has saved his scorn for conservatives — he never dreamt of speaking in such a fashion to Barack Obama. It’s just frantic.”

On McCain calling him a corrupt Abramoff crony, Hayworth says that he’d like to resist the impulse but will say two words in response: “Charles Keating.” Actually, he has more to say: “Think about it: If anything happened with [Abramoff], do you think I could run for Senate? No. The Justice Department never started an investigation; the lawyers said there was no need. There is nothing there in these charges. John knows that, and he’s desperate.”

As to whether he’s a “birther” — someone who believes that President Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate may be false or illegitimate — Hayworth sets the record straight for NRO. “You know the standard of lefty blogs,” he says. “If I even discuss an issue, it must mean I’m an advocate, and that’s preposterous. President Obama is the 44th president of the United States. I don’t have any serious doubts about that. I’ve talked about this because I know that — like when I was a talk-show host — if people want to talk about something, we’ll talk about it. This whole argument about the birth certificate is as arcane as going back and disputing the birth record of Chester Alan Arthur.”

Still, he says, he “thinks it’s important to consider identity-theft issues” when it comes to any candidates for political office, whether they’re from Hawaii or Arizona, pointing to a recent case of a former fugitive running for local office in Scottsdale under a false name as an example. “We should always make sure we confirm that people are who they say they are.”

-SNIP-

Echoing the campaign theme of Scott Brown, Hayworth says McCain is “not entitled to the seat, regardless of his honorable service.” “This seat belongs to the people, not one party or any personality. It belongs to the people,” he adds. “We’ll get into trouble if we assume that a political office is for one person. One of us will win this election, and it will be because we have earned it, not because we’re entitled to it.”

With that, Hayworth takes off again — more handshakes, more laughs, more talking. As he floats around CPAC, a one-man political band, a word comes to mind: This man is, if anything, a maverick.

— Robert Costa is the William F. Buckley Jr. Fellow at National Review Institute.

Did McCain Torpedo JD Hayworth?

UPDATED: Text of 'Blackmail' E-mail Included

Posted by Brian Faughnan (Profile)

Monday, October 12th at 10:16AM EDT

Former Congressman JD Hayworth is reportedly considering a primary challenge to John McCain. In explaining his rationale recently, he made a serious allegation about McCain’s loyalty to party:

Hayworth charged that in 2005 Salter tried to “blackmail” him into stopping his public criticism of McCain’s comprehensive immigration-reform bill. Hayworth said his chief of staff got an e-mail from Salter indicating that McCain might retaliate by commenting in the media about Hayworth’s links to the then-unfolding Jack Abramoff lobbyist corruption scandal.
Hayworth further suggested that Salter was responsible for planting false information in the Washington Times that said Hayworth was the “target” of an Abramoff-related Justice Department investigation. The Abramoff scandal helped Democrat Harry Mitchell upset Hayworth in 2006.
“Now do I know for a fact that Mark Salter was that unnamed source? No, I don’t,” Hayworth told his listeners. “But could a reasonable person connect the dots after, to be polite you could call it a threat, to be more realistic you could call it a threat of blackmail, in that memorandum?”

Sater denies the charge, but both he and McCain have been known for a shoot-from-the-hip style, and a willingness to alienate GOP colleagues. McCain in particular has been prone to explode when dealing with Republican opponents of his immigration reform ideas. Would it really be a surprise if the man who considered a party switch in 2001, and who contemplated becoming Kerry’s vice presidential candidate in 2004, and who attacked Republican colleagues over immigration - had also threatened a Republican colleague over it?

Hayworth was a solid conservative who held a GOP-leaning seat for 12 years. He was ultimately cleared by the Department of Justice in December, 2007 - slightly more than a year after he was defeated for re-election, largely because of questions regarding his supposed ‘links’ to Abramoff.

If McCain contributed to that narrow loss, he ought to answer for it.

Update: It’s come to my attention that JD Hayworth has previously published the text of the E-mail his Chief of Staff received from McCain aide Mark Salter. Judge for yourself if McCain was trying to blackmail Hayworth:

As you can guess, much consternation over here about your boss’s quick attack on a bill [ the McCain-Kennedy Amnesty Bill] we’ve been working on for months, in the most arduous discussions, and we think, managed to arrive at a very good product with a broad constituency behind it, not to mention three of your boss’ delegation members.
Obviously, the attack occurred before anyone has even seen the bill. At best, it was discourteous, and we took it quite personally.
FYI: We’ve been inundated with press requests to comment on your boss’s Abrahamoff, sky box, etc. situation. We’ve refused them. I think you should be prepared for that to change.

Salter says after he sent this E-mail, he got an angry E-mail back and ‘that was the end of it.’ A news search shows that stories about Hayworth and Abramoff increased significantly after this point, but that doesn’t prove anything.

http://www.redstate.com/brianfaughnan/2009/10/12/did-mccain-torpedo-jd-hayworth/

Read the following link for a good description of how JD was robbed.

http://www.espressopundit.com/2008/03/post-1.html

The cost of prosecutors ignoring the "basic rules of fairness" is even higher when the target is an elected official and his opponents suddenly perceive him a vulnerable. The classic example is JD Hayworth

For an example of how it works, lets start with this March 2006 Republic article.

The national Democratic Party is shopping for a big name to oppose Rep. J.D. Hayworth in Arizona's 5th Congressional District this fall, suggesting that the six-term Republican is vulnerable in the wake of a Capitol Hill lobbying scandal to which he has been linked.

"Linked" is such a great word. The word allows the media to claim a connection without actually saying that the elected official is being "investigated" or being "charged." As Kevin Bacon will tell you, there is no way to claim that you are not "linked" to something.

The article makes it clear that the Democratic Party recruited Mitchell because of the "linkage" and the subsequent story.

Hayworth's Chief of Staff was adamant from the beginning that there was no truth to the story.

Eule said Hayworth never has been contacted by investigators, and Eule dismissed the Times story as "totally wrong."

He also had a prediction.

"By the time the election comes around, it will be proved that what Mr. Hayworth said is correct, that he did nothing wrong, that the charges are bogus," Eule said.

http://www.espressopundit.com/2008/03/post-1.html

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.