The email links to a two-minute video hosted on McCain’s campaign site in which the senator explains his admiration for Reagan over pictures of McCain with the Gipper and Nancy, and footage of McCain’s time as a POW. “I enlisted as a foot soldier in the Reagan revolution,” McCain says, as patriotic music pipes up. “Still today, I think of him all the time.”
McCain isn’t the only GOP hopeful gunning for Reagan’s legacy. As The Hotline reports today, Rudy Giuliani’s Web site includes five mentions of Reagan, while Mitt Romney references Reagan eight times, including a news release that tries to explain his shift on abortion policy. Before setting his sights on the White House, the former Massachusetts governor had been viewed as a supporter of abortion rights, refusing to overturn his state’s abortion laws. But, now, according to the site, “Like President Ronald Reagan, Henry Hyde and others before him, he has acknowledged that in the past he had this issue wrong.”
