McCain Tone Deaf in Ohio, Struggling with DHL/UPS Merger

John McCain has gone completely tone deaf to his own campaign stump:

"And that's the problem in our nation's capital. It's not just the Bush administration, and it's not just the Democratic Congress. It's that everyone in Washington says whatever it takes to get elected or to score the political point of the day," said McCain, who has served 26 years in Congress.

Emphasis mine. Kudos to the L.A. Times for following up the quote with the "26 years" tag line. The article, by the way, is especially interesting. In a nutshell, McCain backed a 2003 deal to sell cargo handler Airborne Express to German-owned DHL. Now, business is bad and DHL's owners want to cut losses and get out. According to an Ohioan quoted in the article, this could lead to a loss of 40,000 jobs in 9 southeastern Ohio counties.

Where it gets even trickier is that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, lobbied on behalf of DHL's owners back in 2003, and McCain ponied up. The senator actually helped deep six an amendment to a congressional spending bill that would have kept the U.S. military cargo handling business a U.S. business. In other words, McCain paved the way for foreign interests to handle shipping needs for the U.S. military.

Davis earned a reported $590k for his various lobbying efforts for the German company. McCain says that, since Davis hasn't been involved in any of that since 2005, there's no conflict of interest. What'd McCain get, I wonder?

Most recently, he got the opportunity to tell some distraught Ohioans a little bit of "straight talk": "I can't assure you that this train wreck isn't going to happen, but I will do everything in my power to avert it"; and, "I can't look you in the eye and say we're going to avert this."

As reassuring as those comments weren't, McCain promised to launch an anti-trust investigation into the proposed DHL/UPS merger that would all the German company to earn back some of its losses and get out of Ohio. And after promising to investigate the deal on the Senate floor, McCain said "And that's the problem in our nation's capital. It's not just the Bush administration, and it's not just the Democratic Congress. It's that everyone in Washington says whatever it takes to get elected or to score the political point of the day."

Like I said. Tone deaf.