Citing their long family history, Republican U.S. Sen. John McCain says he won’t come to Colorado to campaign against Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Udall.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has had a long relationship with the Udall family. (Carolyn Kaster, The Associated Press)
The Arizona Republic says McCain will campaign for Republican Senate candidates in Kansas, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire and Oregon. Asked if he was avoiding Colorado because of his long association with Udall, , “and his father, yes.”
On the presidential campaign trail in 2008, McCain frequently repeated jokes he heard from the man he considered his mentor, longtime Congressman Morris “Mo” Udall, who . In Waukee, Iowa, Rocky Mountain News reporter M.E. Sprengelmeyer pulled McCain aside. Considering how often McCain invoked “Mo” might he endorse Udall’s son, Mark, in Colorado’s U.S. Senate race?
“I love him. He’s a wonderful young man,” McCain replied — but he didn’t address the endorsement issue.
Udall handily won that race in a wave Democratic. This time around, it’s expected to be a GOP year and Udall faces a tough competitor, U.S. Rep. Cory Gardner, R-Yuma.
McCain’s relationship with the elder Morris was detailed in his memoir “Worth the Fighting For.” Their friendship also was mentioned in a 1997 , which was rehashed plenty when McCain ran for president:
He was taken in hand by Morris Udall, the Arizona congressman who was the liberal conscience of the Congress and a leading voice for reform.
“Mo reached out to me in 50 different ways,” McCain recalled. “Right from the start, he’d say: ‘I’m going to hold a press conference out in Phoenix. Why don’t you join me?’ All these journalists would show up to hear what Mo had to say. In the middle of it all, Mo would point to me and say, ‘I’d like to hear John’s views.’ Well, hell, I didn’t have any views. But I got up and learned and was introduced to the state.”
Four years later, when McCain ran for and won Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat, he said he felt his greatest debt of gratitude not to Goldwater — who had shunned him — but to Udall. “There’s no way Mo could have been more wonderful,” he says, “and there was no reason for him to be that way.”
When Udall was ill with Parkinson’s disease in a veterans hospital in northeast Washington, McCain was his only regular visitor. By Michael Lewis.
