Facing conservative foe, John McCain says, 'Complete the danged fence'
Dan Nowicki, The Arizona Republic Dan Nowicki
Arizona Sen. John McCain shook his \
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The Republic | azcentral.com
Editor's note: This is the 17th of an 18-chapter profile of Sen. John McCain, portions of which originally were published in October 1999 and March 2007. It has been updated and expanded. Read more about this project: John McCain’s American Story.

Sen. John McCain and Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu walk together in Nogales, Arizona, along a fence marking the U.S.-Mexico border.

"Drug and human smuggling. Home invasions. Murder," McCain says.

"We're outmanned. Of all the illegals in America, more than half come through Arizona," Babeu responds.

"Have we got the right plan?" McCain asks.

"Plan's perfect. You bring troops, state, county and local law enforcement together," Babeu answers.

"And complete the danged fence," McCain adds.

"It'll work this time. Senator, you're one of us," Babeu responds.

The 30-second commercial, created by McCain adman Fred Davis for his 2010 Senate re-election campaign, would become notorious. To many pundits, Democrats and immigration-reform advocates, it was proof that the Republican "maverick" of a decade earlier was gone forever.

No longer even feigning at a bipartisan compromise on immigration reform, McCain embraced Arizona Senate Bill 1070, the tough immigration-enforcement law signed by Gov. Jan Brewer that had sparked a national furor.

Nevermind that national Democrats spent the 2008 presidential race attacking his maverick brand, calling it phony. McCain's reputation for bucking his party, supposedly for the good of the country, was attacked anew.

For the moment anyway, McCain, R-Ariz., couldn't have cared less what his old friends in the national media thought.

Drinking the tea

Though he had been the Republican Party's presidential nominee just a couple of years earlier, McCain found himself targeted for defeat from the far right. It had reasserted its influence as part of the conservative "tea party" revolution, an angry reaction in part to Washington's taxpayer-funded bailouts of banks, insurance companies and automakers.

McCain was facing a primary challenge from former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, a border-security hawk who, after voters tossed him out of Congress in 2006, continued his rants against illegal immigration and "amnesty" — and McCain — as a right-wing talk-show host on Phoenix radio station KFYI (550 AM).

Ever the savvy politician, McCain had noticed a change in the political winds and started tacking to the right almost immediately after returning to the Senate following his 2008 loss to Barack Obama.

His instincts and presidential campaign experience would allow him to avoid the fate of his colleague Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, who was deemed too moderate and denied renomination at his state's GOP convention, and others.

"When I ran for president, I wasn't campaigning in a vacuum," McCain said in 2010. "I could sense even then the anger, the frustration, the disconnect."

As the media moaned about the loss of the maverick, longtime McCain watchers knew exactly what he was doing.

"The dilemma for the senator is that it doesn't do him any good to be a maverick and compete in the center in the general election if he's defeated in the primary," said Bruce Merrill, the veteran Arizona political scientist who closely followed McCain's political career from his first race for Congress in 1982 until Merrill's death in April 2016.

Charlie Cook, a national political analyst and National Journal columnist, wrote at the time: "The truth is that McCain would be a dead man in this primary had he not seen this coming and begun repositioning himself. The political climate for a Republican who has long relished poking his party's ideologues in the eye is awful."

McCain quickly smothered speculation that he might retire rather than seek a fifth term in 2010, creating a new political-action committee less than a month after the presidential election.

"I intend to run again," McCain said at a Nov. 25, 2008, Phoenix news conference. "I would expect a very tough race. You always expect a tough race, no matter what, and be prepared for that."

Arizona political junkies had long fantasized about a 2010 political heavyweight battle between McCain and two-term Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, but Obama's decision to tap her as Homeland Security secretary ended any possibility of such a marquee matchup. Napolitano's exit let Republican Jan Brewer, next in line as Arizona's secretary of state, ascend to the Governor's Office.

'Party-line opposition'

Democrats now held the Senate with a healthy majority thanks to Obama's 2008 coattails.

McCain, relegated to the minority, mostly fell in line with GOP opposition to Obama initiatives, such as the $787 billion emergency economic-stimulus package and the president's signature health-care-reform legislation that Republicans would derisively dub "Obamacare."

"That's a party-line position: opposing Obama on just about everything," Rodolfo Espino, an assistant political-science professor at Arizona State University, told The Arizona Republic at the time. "It's certainly not the M.O. for the maverick he liked to claim he was."

McCain's retort was that he never considered himself a maverick, even in the late 1990s when he was crusading for campaign-finance reform and battling the tobacco companies and in his initial, unsuccessful run for the White House in 2000.

"That was a label that was given to me a long time ago," McCain told The Republic after an April 2010 event in Scottsdale. "I don't decide on the labels that I am given. I said I have always acted in what I think is in the best interests of the state and the country, and that's the way that I will always behave."

More than just fodder for those who insisted McCain had changed, his defiance of Obama led some to deride him as a sore loser.

"Let me just make this point, John, because we're not campaigning anymore. The election's over," Obama at one point testily said to McCain during a Feb. 25, 2010, health-care summit.

"I'm reminded of that every day," McCain responded with a laugh.

McCain often would say that he treated Obama no differently than Bush or how he would later treat President Donald Trump. But where criticism of a Republican president brought him praise as a maverick, McCain noted, similar criticism of Obama got him tagged as a bitter old man who couldn't get over losing the 2008 election.

The fact was by the time of his exchange with Obama, McCain had been campaigning for a new Senate term for a year. By May 2009, he was in full re-election mode and traveling the state.

He had two official GOP primary challengers: Chris Simcox, founder of the border-watch group Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, and Jim Deakin, a politically unknown businessman and Navy veteran.

Hayworth, the former six-term congressman, wouldn't officially enter the race until early the next year, but he would routinely attack McCain as too liberal from behind his KFYI microphone.

A lesson from Goldwater

The race would highlight a lesson McCain had learned from his predecessor, Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Ariz.:

Goldwater, the 1964 Republican presidential nominee, would admit that he became too complacent in later years and it nearly resulted in his defeat in his bid for a fifth Senate term in 1980. It taught McCain that even a long-serving politician with a national profile and icon status can wear out his welcome.

McCain vowed to take no vote for granted and said he took even minor primary foes seriously.

"You can't translate a national campaign into a statewide campaign," McCain said. "You've got to understand that there are very different fundamental elements in a statewide campaign. You've got to concentrate more on the grass-roots side of things."

McCain would spare no expense and leave nothing to chance in the 2010 primary race.

He would call in Sarah Palin, his 2008 running mate who remained popular with conservatives, to campaign with him. He also stumped with Scott Brown, who would have a short career as a Republican star after he won the Massachusetts Senate seat vacated by the death of liberal Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democratic giant on Capitol Hill. Mitt Romney, his 2008 GOP rival turned trusted friend and ally, appeared with him in Mesa, helping McCain shore up support in a city where many residents shared Romney's Mormon faith.

"These are truly turbulent times, and in turbulent times, America needs a heavyweight senator," Romney, the future 2012 Republican presidential nominee, told the audience at a joint appearance with McCain at Mesa High School. "On behalf of the nation, I'm asking my friends in Arizona to do us all, as Americans, a favor. And that's to re-elect the great, strong senator from Arizona, Sen. John McCain."

On another front, McCain tried to distance himself from his support of the $700 billion Trouble Asset Relief Program that bailed out the banks during the financial meltdown. That vote was a major point of contention with tea-party voters who wanted McCain ousted.

At a February 2010 meeting with The Republic's editorial board, McCain complained that TARP did not focus on the reeling housing market as it was sold to him and other lawmakers.

"Something had to be done because the world's financial system was on the verge of collapse," McCain said. "Any economist, liberal or conservative, would agree with that. The action they took, I don't agree with."

Hayworth joined the GOP primary race in January 2010. McCain may have helped precipitate that development. His campaign lawyers had complained to the Federal Communications Commission that Hayworth was abusing the public airwaves by de facto campaigning against McCain during his KFYI program. Clear Channel Communications, KFYI's owner, had muzzled Hayworth from talking about McCain a few days before his exit.

A tea-party challenger

From the start, Hayworth, 51, was a flawed tea-party warrior.

For one thing, he had never earned a reputation during his 1995-2007 tenure in the House of Representatives as much of a fiscal conservative, as his Arizona colleagues Reps. John Shadegg, Matt Salmon and Jeff Flake had. Hayworth was remembered more as a Republican pork-barreler and loyal GOP foot soldier for then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and thus was not particularly persuasive as an anti-establishment candidate.

In the mid-2000s, Hayworth also got tangled up in the corruption scandal involving disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Ironically, as Senate Indian Affairs Committee chairman, McCain had led an investigation into Abramoff.

Hayworth was never charged and protested fiercely when his name was mentioned in connection to Abramoff's. He did donate to charity the $2,250 that Abramoff contributed to his campaigns and leadership political-action committee between 1996 and 1999. But Hayworth kept donations from Indian tribes connected to Abramoff and used Abramoff's sports skyboxes for five fundraisers between 1999 and 2001. He did not initially report as required the use of the skyboxes as "in-kind" contributions. He maintained the tribes wanted him to keep the money.

Hayworth also had set up a special fund that allowed supporters to help him pay a $142,500 legal bill for preparations for a possible Justice Department investigation related to Abramoff. McCain launched a web video demanding that Hayworth "come clean on your secret Abramoff trust fund."

The Abramoff scandal was central to one of many ads McCain used to pound Hayworth's character.

In other ways, though, Hayworth was in tune with the anti-Obama far right that wanted to dump McCain over his past support of "amnesty" for undocumented immigrants and TARP vote.

He flirted with the fringe — and thoroughly debunked — "birther" conspiracy theory that held Obama was actually born in Kenya, not Hawaii, and thus was not constitutionally eligible to serve as president. In some instances, Hayworth cited the possibility of identity theft as a reason why Obama and other politicians should be forced to show their original birth certificates.

"Well, gosh, we all had to bring our birth certificates to show we were who we said we were, and we were the age we said we were, to play football and youth sports," Hayworth said in an appearance on MSNBC. "Shouldn't we know exactly that anyone who wants to run for public office is a natural-born citizen of the United States and is who they say they are?"

Debating border security

On the hot-button immigration issue, Hayworth was much more formidable.

Prior to losing his House seat in a Republican-leaning congressional district to former Tempe Mayor Harry Mitchell, Hayworth had emerged as a border hard-liner, even publishing a 2005 book titled "Whatever It Takes: Illegal Immigration, Border Security, and the War on Terror."

Minuteman founder Simcox, the other immigration hawk in the race, never was much of a factor. He dropped out and endorsed Hayworth. (In 2016, Simcox would be convicted on two counts of child molestation involving a 5-year-old girl and a 6-year-old girl and one count of providing obscene material to a minor. He was sentenced to 19½ years in prison.)

The controversy over Arizona's SB 1070 had reignited the border-security debate in the state. The still-unsolved March 27, 2010, murder of Robert Krentz, a longtime Cochise County rancher, by a gunman who is believed to have escaped to Mexico, further inflamed passions and increased calls for National Guard troops at the border.

Hayworth used the Krentz murder to attack McCain.

"I am heartened to hear that, as of yesterday now, Senator McCain has decided that, gee, there could be a military presence on the border," Hayworth said in an interview with Channel 3 (KTVK-TV). "The tragedy is, it's too late for the Krentz family, and the problems continue unabated."

McCain's campaign fired back that McCain had supported deploying National Guard troops to the border since March 2009.

"In truth, he's lying about Senator McCain's record in order to accuse him of being responsible for this murder," said Brian Rogers, a McCain campaign spokesman. "It's despicable."

It was in that climate that McCain's "danged fence" ad appeared.

McCain maintained his position on immigration reform and border security had not changed since his 2007 pivot during the presidential campaign that put a priority on enforcement. McCain still supported reforms such as a guest-worker program and a pathway to citizenship for many of the undocumented immigrants who had settled in the United States, but now insisted that the border would have to be secured first in order to restore public confidence in the federal government.

McCain maintained that a rise in Mexican drug-cartel violence justified the new urgency for border security. But you weren't likely to hear McCain voice support for the broader immigration reforms on the campaign trail.

"I remember John Kerry saying in the 2008 campaign, 'It's not the John McCain that I knew!' — it's hilarious," McCain told The Republic. "But it's a great political ploy, though, because then you really attack somebody's credibility by saying that they changed. It's a political ploy that sometimes works. I don't think it works in Arizona."

As it turned out, it didn't. Hayworth's claims of a McCain election-year conversion on border security didn't stick and polls soon indicated McCain was beating Hayworth, even on the immigration issue. Some McCain insiders worried the awkward "danged fence" ad was overkill, but McCain approved it anyway.

The spot got a lot of national attention — in a bad way — drawing widespread ridicule and spawning parodies.

Blanketing the airwaves

Flush with cash left over from his 2008 presidential campaign, McCain bombarded the airwaves.

Video surfaced of Hayworth in a 2007 late-night infomercial acting as a pitchman for National Grant Conferences, a company that has been criticized by consumer advocates for its misleading claims about the availability of "free" government money.

National Grants Conferences got an "F" rating from the Better Business Bureau, was hit by a consumer-fraud lawsuit brought by Vermont's attorney general, and went bankrupt in 2008.

McCain seized on Hayworth's initial response to criticism over his role in the cringe-inducing video. He said consumers should have been wary about the potential of a ripoff.

"I always say about any product or service, one of the staples I learned growing up is 'caveat emptor' — 'buyer beware,' " Hayworth said in a webcast titled "Round Table Politics."

A TV ad hit Hayworth as a "pork-barrel spender," a lobbyist and a "huckster."

"Voter beware," the McCain commercial's narrator says.

Hayworth eventually issued a more formal apology. "I believed ... this to be a reputable firm, but I did not completely check out the organization," Hayworth said in a sign that the controversy was hurting his campaign.

McCain's onslaught of negative advertising took its toll on Hayworth.

"John has a record that he does not want to run on. That's why he's engaged in this kind of attack ad," Hayworth said of the "huckster" attack during a televised debate with McCain. "And, frankly, it's really unbecoming to you, John. You're not a statesman any longer, you're just a political shape-shifter."

Hayworth's first TV spot featured his wife, Mary Hayworth, scolding McCain for his "character assassination" of her husband.

"John McCain has sold out the people of Arizona on immigration, bailouts and tax increases," Mary Hayworth says in the ad. "... John McCain should be ashamed. J.D.'s not perfect, but he is a principled conservative."

Hayworth aimed a tough ad at McCain, too.

It took a line spoken by McCain in his own audiobook reading of his 2002 memoir "Worth the Fighting For." McCain was trying to come to terms with his 2000 presidential-race decision to go along with campaign aides who wanted him to stop criticizing South Carolina's continued flying of the Confederate flag. McCain wrote that he had a choice between "lying or losing" to Republican rival George W. Bush and "I chose lying."

"Now McCain lies again," the Hayworth ad's announcer said, suggesting that McCain was now lying to mask a record of supporting "amnesty."

It wasn't enough. Hayworth could not compete with McCain's massive spending.

On Aug. 24, 2010, the supposedly vulnerable McCain routed the tea party and crushed Hayworth at the polls. He easily dispatched his Democratic opponent, former Tucson Councilman Rodney Glassman, in the Nov. 2 general election.

At age 74, McCain had navigated some of the most turbulent political waters of his career to secure another six years on Capitol Hill.

It would be a breeze compared with what came next.

NEXT CHAPTER: John McCain wins 6th term, reclaims 'maverick' label

John McCain's American Story