McCain denies bullying Sandinista
Sen. Cochran says he snatched man’s shirt
By Beth Fouhy
- ASSOCIATED PRESS
Updated: 07/03/08 7:01 AM
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- Sen. John McCain on his campaign jet Wednesday addresses the rescue of 15 hostages in Colombia as his wife looks on.
CARTAGENA, Colombia — Sen. John McCain on Wednesday denied a Republican colleague’s claim that he roughed up an associate of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega on a diplomatic mission in 1987, saying the allegation was “simply not true.”
Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., told a Mississippi newspaper that he saw McCain, during a trip to Nicaragua led by former Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., grab an Ortega associate by his shirt collar and lift him out of his chair.
The Republican presidential contender, who is known for his hot temper, was questioned about the alleged incident at a news conference here. He noted that at the time, he had been asked to serve as co-chairman of a Central American working group in the Senate with Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and had made several trips to the region in that role.
“I had many, many meetings with the Sandinistas,” McCain said. “I must say, I did not admire the Sandinistas much. But there was never anything of that nature. It just didn’t happen.”
His comments did not square with Cochran’s detailed recollection of the alleged incident.
“McCain was down at the end of the table, and we were talking to the head of the guerrilla group here at this end of the table, and I don’t know what attracted my attention,” Cochran said in an interview with the Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss.
“But I saw some kind of quick movement at the bottom of the table, and I looked down there, and John had reached over and grabbed this guy by the shirt collar and had snatched him up like he was throwing him up out of the chair to tell him what he thought about him or whatever.
“I don’t know what he was telling him, but I thought, ‘Good grief, everybody around here has got guns, and we were there on a diplomatic mission.’ I don’t know what had happened to provoke John, but he obviously got mad at the guy . . . and he just reached over there and snatched . . . him.”
McCain has battled for years with Cochran, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee who has complained about McCain’s temper before, over pet projects or “earmarks” inserted by committee members into spending bills.
Meanwhile, McCain hailed the economic benefits of free trade, raising the possibility of an eventual hemispheric-wide agreement.
He promoted a proposed
U. S.-Colombian Free Trade Agreement that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, opposes, suggesting the tariffs imposed on American goods now exported to Colombia would disappear under the agreement, creating jobs in the United States.
McCain promoted the North American Free Trade Agreement, which he has said would benefit the U. S. economy over time.
He also toured Colombia’s largest port by speedboat to review the country’s U. S.-backed drug interdiction programs.
In another development, McCain put a top adviser in control of day-to-day campaign operations following weeks of private concerns among Republicans that his campaign had not made the transition from the primaries to the general election.
Steve Schmidt, a veteran of President Bush’s re-election campaign and a member of the Arizona senator’s inner circle, will oversee daily political, strategy, coalitions, scheduling and communications efforts from the campaign’s northern Virginia headquarters.
