While partisans of the House of Cantor scheme for Boehner’s blood (or whatever the fluid is that gives him that distinctive, possibly teratogenic glow), the NYTimes has a tonguebath ready for “This Year’s Maverick”. In the blue-collar Bronx neighborhood where I grew up, a politician who took pride in his ability to “run with the hare and hunt with the hounds” was known as a trimmer, and that was not a term of respect:
Graham is not a morning person, but at that hour in May he was thoroughly revved up… Big issues rattle from his brain and out of his inert, somewhat glassy-eyed face as if dispensed by a gum-ball machine. Among these was the Kerry-Lieberman climate-change bill — or “energy independence” bill, as he preferred to call it for the sake of attracting conservative support. (“To me, it is about jobs, not polar bears!”) After attending 183 meetings and devoting more than 120 hours of scheduled Senate time to the matter, Graham dropped his co-sponsorship of the legislation when the Senate majority leader, the Democrat Harry Reid, disclosed in late April that his priority would be passage of an immigration bill. (Reid later reversed his decision.) Graham promptly called Reid on the phone and accused him of shifting the legislative calendar to woo Hispanic voters in Reid’s uphill re-election struggle, and then, according to Graham, the two exchanged “a few F-bombs” before hanging up…
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“Everything I’m doing now in terms of talking about climate, talking about immigration, talking about Gitmo is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement’s at,” Graham said… On four occasions, Graham met with Tea Party groups. The first, in his Senate office, was “very, very contentious,” he recalled. During a later meeting, Graham said he challenged them: “ ‘What do you want to do? You take back your country — and do what with it?’ . . . Everybody went from being kind of hostile to just dead silent.”
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There was a time, barely more than a decade ago, when Lindsey Graham was a darling of the right wing — a Newt Gingrich acolyte who in 1994 delivered to the Republicans a House seat that was occupied by a Democrat since 1877; who at one moment was an unremarkable Huck Finn look-alike seated at an overflow table beside the House Judiciary Committee dais next to Sonny Bono’s widow, Mary, and then a moment later burst out of his cocoon during the Clinton impeachment hearings with that rhetorical gem, “Is this Peyton Place or Watergate?” Four years later in 2002, he easily won election to the Senate seat that was occupied by Strom Thurmond for the previous 48 years. But just as Thurmond could himself defy orthodoxy now and then, Graham signaled his waywardness early on. Disillusioned by Gingrich’s infidelities to his own Contract With America, Graham joined several others in an attempted coup against Gingrich, who was then speaker of the House…
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Certain elements of Graham’s dance routine with the White House are available for public viewing. Graham has already signaled that he would be receptive to confirming Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court this summer. First, however, he will extract his pound of flesh. “I want to make the case that she’s a liberal,” he told me. “Part of this whole exercise is to say to the public that if you want liberal judges, fine — vote for a liberal candidate for president. If the policy Harvard had toward military recruitment upsets you, you need to understand that liberals think that way.”…
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On other matters, Graham has unabashedly supported the Obama administration. He credits the president for his attentiveness to Pakistan, for sending more troops to Afghanistan and for recently declaring a moratorium on deep-water drilling while remaining open to future domestic oil exploration. These, of course, are among the issues on which Obama has disappointed his liberal supporters. I asked Graham if he felt that he had taken the full measure of the president. “No, I don’t,” he said. “I got comfortable with Bush. I’m not comfortable with Obama.”
And speaking of ‘getting comfortable’, there’s one thing Senator Graham wants the whole world to know:
During a South Carolina Tea Party rally this spring, one speaker created an uproar by postulating that Graham supported a guest-worker program out of fear that the Democrats might otherwise expose his homosexuality. (Graham smirked when I brought this up. “Like maybe I’m having a clandestine affair with Ricky Martin,” he said. “I know it’s really gonna upset a lot of gay men — I’m sure hundreds of ’em are gonna be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge — but I ain’t available. I ain’t gay. Sorry.”)
Dear Senator Graham: When you are lurking in the cloakroom stall, a couple of your colleagues enter, one says: “Lindsey Graham — what a dick!” … and his friend agrees, “HUGE asshole”… they may not be discussing your sexual proclivities.
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Lindsey Graham, Free Spirit or Wild Child?Post + Comments (73)