Since the presidential campaign began last year, no remaining candidate has been more absent from their day job than Sen. John McCain.
The Arizona Republican has missed more than half of the votes in the Senate since January 2007. One MSNBC host is wondering whether the media-friendly GOP presidential candidate isn't getting a pass from the national press and if McCain would have a better grasp on the issues if he had bothered to show up more often.
"McCain has missed votes on everything from consumer product safety to the economy to defense for aid for injured vets and yet the media just seemed to let it pass as they obsess only over [Democrats Barack] Obama and [Hillary] Clinton," MSNBC's Dan Abrams said Tuesday, noting a report that McCain has missed 56 percent of Senate votes.
Abrams tied the absenteeism to McCain's shifting view of the US economy, noting the senator said in January that he thought everything would be fine before saying this week he agreed with Alan Greenspan's assessment that the economic trouble the country is facing is worse than at any point since World War II.
"The bottom line is if Obama or Clinton had made this kind of flip-flop on the economy, this would be the story plastered everywhere," he said. "And almost no one is talking about it."
McCain trailed only Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD) in absenteeism since the beginning of last year, and Johnson spent most of 2007 recovering from a brain hemmorrhage.
"What makes it so ironic is McCain talks about his experience. So what experience does he have from the last year or so?" asked Democratic strategist Margie Omero, a guest on Abrams show. "He's not serving the people of Arizona. He's not brushing up on the economy. He just said that he is not smart enough for this whole home mortgage business, and he's not brushing up on the conflict or the war we're in in Iraq."
Despite the lackluster performance since last year, McCain's lifetime attendance record is fairly solid -- he's missed 11 percent of votes since 1987 -- and he's nowhere near as missing from the Senate as Sen. John Kerry was four years ago, when he missed 72 percent of votes in 2003-04, according to the New York Times. Clinton has missed 27 percent of Senate votes, while Obama missed 37 percent.
MSNBC's Dan Abrams reports that John McCain has missed more votes than any other healthy senator since January 2007.
This video is from MSNBC's Verdict, broadcast March 25, 2008.
