Faster than you can say John McCain, I was proven wrong on the issue of candidate visits to Vermont.
McCain, the Republican front-runner for the presidential nomination, will be in South Burlington at 11 a.m. Thursday, for a rally next to the airport. Word came this afternoon from his campaign aide, Jim Barnett, the former Vermont Republican Party chairman who latched onto McCain's campaign in the early days, survived a rough ride through the middle, and is flying high these days.
Gov. Jim Douglas will do the introducing and McCain will speak at the rally, which is open to the public.
Democrat Peter Galbraith, the one-time ambassador-turned-potential-candidate-for-governor, had some thoughts today about McCain's surge (pun intended) at the polls. Galbraith has a fair amount of expertise in Iraq, having taken up the issue of Saddam Hussein's genocide against the Kurds some years ago.
Galbraith said McCain's resurgence as a candidate for the Republican nominee has depended on the success of the troop surge in Iraq, and Galbraith's view is that that surge did not really work, and that that's beginning to show, with an increase in car bombs.
"Iraq is going down the tubes," he said. "The surge is beginning to fail."
His suggestion: McCain's timing has been fortuitous.
Galbraith, who was ambassador to Croatia in the Bill Clinton administration, is a Hillary Clinton supporter. He said he did not have the power to lure her to Vermont before the March 4 primary.
- Terri Hallenbeck
