When it rains it pours and today is a very stormy day for John McCain. His twenty-year old volunteer in Pittsburgh brought him some serious flack, but when a ranking adviser for the campaign jumps ship and endorses your opponent, that is a hard slap in the face. Charles Fried did just that with a week and a half before the election.
From The Huffington Post:
The Wall Street Journal today rounds up the horde of prominent Republicans jumping ship to Barack Obama. Now one of McCain's actual advisers has switched sides:
Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."
Fried is no small fish, McCain has talked up his endorsement throughout the year and now his support isn't just gone, so is his ballot, thanks to early-voting. Fried was Reagan's Solicitor General and an icon in conservative circles for sometime. Obviously Sarah Palin's presence has been too much for him (as you can see the slightly disgusted look on his face), as it has for the rest of us, save for the religious wingnuts and comedians around the globe.
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