Romney piled on McCain for third-party ads touting him in South Carolina, saying “It is an entire end-run on any effort to control campaign spending and offer transparency,” and adding “that the legislation championed by McCain in 2002 to overhaul campaign finance had turned out to be a failure.”
McCain senior adviser Mark Salter sent a statement to AP responding to the swipe. Here’s the full statement (AP used only part of it):
When Mitt Romney expresses his concern over an “end run around any effort to control campaign spending and offer transparency,” he’s talking about a law authored by Senator McCain that Romney once supported, and, when it suited his ambitions, flipped his position on, as he has changed positions on virtually every issue at stake in this election from abortion to immigration to the war in Iraq. Senator McCain has strongly condemned the independent expenditure, called for it to stop and urged his donor’s not to support it. Mitt Romney once promised not to self-fund his campaign, and ever since has been busy robbing his kids’ inheritance to do just that. If hypocrisy were an olympic sport, Mitt Romney would be a multiple gold medal winner. John McCain stands by his principles, all of them. It will be a cold day in Gila Bend, Arizona when Mitt Romney stands by a single one.
When he sent the quote to me, Salter included a postscript: “I might also add that in Romney’s statement he criticized McCain for circumventing campaign finance laws and then criticized the law itself. He flip-flops in a single attack, which I think might be a first in this business.”
I’m gonna miss the eating of their own thing when we get to the general.