Jonathan Stein at Mother Jones writes about how Rep. John Lewis, a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, doesn’t have the foggiest idea why his name keeps coming out of John McCain’s mouth.
In response to McCain’s latest invocation of his name, Rep. Lewis said in a statement requested by Mother Jones, “I cannot stop one human being, even a presidential candidate, from admiring the courage and sacrifice of peaceful protesters on the Edmund Pettus Bridge or making comments about it.” But, he added, “Sen. McCain and I are colleagues in the US Congress, not confidantes. He does not consult me. And I do not consult him.”
The fact that McCain and Lewis don’t have a relationship at all might be considered unusual, because McCain assured Rick Warren that Lewis would have a prominent role in a McCain adminsitration.
The first time McCain wiped his face in Lewis’s bloody shirt was at a speech McCain gave at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, commemorating Bloody Sunday. Of course, Lewis wasn’t mentioned at that speech either. If McCain really admired Lewis then he might consider ceasing to use him as a campaign prop. Unfortunately, the McCain campaign has been using black folks this way all year.
Earlier this year, McCain went on a tour of “forgotten places,” including New Orleans and Gee’s Bend, Alabama Although McCain has been fairly inactive on the fallout from Katrina, that didn’t stop him from going down there and making a speech letting everyone know what a great guy he was for caring. Likewise, his entire tour wasn’t about offering a compelling economic agenda to those “forgotten places,” he was just there to pat people on the head and let them know he’d be “their president too.” At Rick Warren’s forum, he invoked “the