How did McCain not know of Dr. King's history? The "I have a dream" speech was during the 1963 March on Washington. The Selma-to-Montgomery march was in 1965. Martin Luther King was killed in April 1968.
John McCain wasn't living in the US during that period. He was deployed overseas after graduating (Navy) flight training in 1960. By 1966, he was in the Pacific flying missions over Vietnam. He was shot down and captured in 1967 and remained in a North Vietnamese prison until 1973. Prisoners at the "Hanoi Hilton" had no access to the news and didn't receive mail for years, or not at all.
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Factcheck.org: McCain's Misleading Mailer
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Taxpayer-Funded Abortions?
One section says in bold letters: "Romney provided taxpayer-funded abortions." That's unfair and misleading at best and certainly leaves a false impression. Romney never pushed for taxpayer funding for abortions. The state law he signed provided greatly expanded state-subsidized health insurance for low-income residents, but it left decisions about what should be covered to an independent body, the Commonwealth Connector. It was that body, not Romney, that ruled that abortions would be covered.
In truth, the state had little choice but to cover abortions. The state Supreme Court had ruled in 1980 that the Massachusetts Constitution confers on Massachusetts women an even broader right to abortion than does the U.S. Constitution. It restated in a 1997 decision that the state must pay for medically necessary abortions if it pays for all other medically necessary procedures including services in connection with childbirth.
It is possible to argue (and some have done so) that Romney might have put up a public fight to narrow the abortion coverage had he chosen to do so, or that the Commonwealth Connector decided to cover more than is "medically necessary." But it is simply false for McCain to claim that "Romney provided taxpayer funded abortions" when taxpayers had been ordered by the courts to pay for them long before Romney took office.
Stoning a Glass House
The mailer further says that Romney "refused to endorse Bush Tax Cut Plan," and there is more than a grain of truth to that. As we've reported before, Romney was quoted in 2003 as telling his state's congressional delegation that he "won't be a cheerleader" for cuts that he doesn't agree with and that he wouldn't oppose the cuts in public because he "has to keep a solid relationship with the White House."
What makes the McCain mailer misleading is that McCain himself went way beyond quietly refusing to endorse the 2003 tax cut plan. He was one of only three Senate Republicans to vote against it. The day after Bush proposed the cuts he criticized them as too generous to the rich. "It is middle-income Americans that have kept our economy afloat by buying houses and automobiles," McCain said on MSNBC's "Hardball." "I believe that they deserve the majority of the break, not the higher-income level of Americans."
By attacking Romney for not supporting the 2003 cuts, McCain invites readers to believe that he himself must have supported them, which isn't true. Furthermore, McCain also voted against Bush's 2001 tax cuts, before Romney took office as governor.
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