“Age was never an issue when you stuck to your guns!” White House Communications Director Connie Spano reminds youthful President Whitmore minutes before spaceships begin demolishing all humans in that keenest of all political meditations, Independence Day. For John McCain, who loves guns and those who shoot them, his 71 years of age has been an issue throughout his campaign—Huckabee crony Chuck Norris infamously said he couldn’t vote for McCain because he was too old, only to have Sly Stallone and McCain’s feisty 95-year-old mother Roberta defend McCain with vim and vigor. But it seems like Chuck wasn’t the only one with reservations.
According to the Washington Post, when McCain’s campaign nearly self-destructed last fall due to a profound lack of funds, he was able to secure a $3 million line of credit in November from a bank in Bethesda, Maryland, with one proviso: he had to take out a special life insurance policy in case he failed to survive the campaign. At issue was McCain’s chief asset of collateral—his extensive fundraising lists—that would lose their value if the Arizona senator were to keel while stumping at an IHOP in Iowa.
Now, nearly three months and three massive primary victories later, McCain is still alive. His newfound frontrunner status brings in donations which have alleviated some of his financial woes, though Mitt Romney is expected to counter McCain’s primaries momentum with a deluge of ads and outreach before Super Tuesday and its 21 states in play, including Colorado. If McCain hopes to keep pace with Romney’s estimated personal fortune of $250 million, he may need to consider alternative methods of financing including, but not limited to:
--Covering the spread on himself in the Capitol Hill Dead Pool --Challenging Chuck Norris to lucrative bare-knuckles prizefight --Taking out a double-or-nothing policy on his indestructible mother --Copyrighting the usage of “al Qaeda” --Selling his AARP benefits --Investing in long-term Baghdad timeshare condo
For all of their constant blustering about the legacy of modern GOP godfather Ronald Reagan, who was elected in 1980 when he was a spry 69, conservative Republicans have yet to embrace McCain’s claims of similarly wizened tenacity. After all, when Reagan was McCain’s age, he had already had a year in office, freed the Iranian hostages, fired the air traffic controllers and survived an assassination attempt. Just think of the loan he could have gotten. -- Joe Horton
