To hear the LA Times tell it, there is no fracture in the Democrat party over Barack Obama’s hard right turn since becoming the Democrat nominee. All those pissed-off liberals you see tearfully exclaiming “But we thought you were the changey Messiah!” are just an optical illusion. The printed left-coast version of Baghdad Bob would like to direct your attention elsewhere now, thank you very much.
Contrast this with the assumed rift between the Republican nominee and the wife of a former Republican President as reported in the LA Times. As evidence, they resurrect a 28-year-old falling out between McCain and the Reagans that conveniently also allows them to dig deeply into the very relevant matter of McCain’s uncontested 1980 divorce.
Typical of this liberal bastion, the article is filled with innuendo and speculation about McCain’s divorce – particularly the timing as it related to his new relationship with current wife Cindy – drawing conclusions that would be tenuous at best even if they were relevant to the election.
Outside her Bel-Air home, Nancy Reagan stood arm in arm with John McCain and offered a significant — but less than exuberant — endorsement.
“Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided, and then we endorsed,” the Republican matriarch said in March. “Well, obviously this is the nominee of the party.” They were the only words she would speak during the five-minute photo op.
In a written statement, she described McCain as “a good friend for over 30 years.” But that friendship was strained in the late 1970s by McCain’s decision to divorce his first wife, Carol, who was particularly close to the Reagans, and within weeks marry Cindy Hensley, the young heiress to a lucrative Arizona beer distributorship.
The Reagans rushed to help Carol, finding her a new home in Southern California with the family of Reagan aide Edwin Meese III and a series of political and White House jobs to ease her through that difficult time.
[...]
Until McCain filed for divorce, the Reagans and their inner circle assumed he was happily married, and they were stunned to learn otherwise, according to several close aides.
“Everybody was upset with him,” recalled Nancy Reynolds, a top aide to the former president who introduced him to McCain.
McCain, as he has since the beginning, takes full responsibility for the personal rift between himself and the Reagans.
John McCain, who calls himself “a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” said in his memoir: “My divorce from Carol, whom the Reagans loved, caused a change in our relationship. Nancy . . . was particularly upset with me and treated me on the few occasions we encountered each other after I came to Congress with a cool correctness that made her displeasure clear.
“I had, of course, deserved the change in our relationship.”
The Times’ examination of how one of John McCain’s friends may or may not have felt about him nearly 30 years ago lasts 3 online pages.
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