Arizona Sen. John McCain — whose complaints about process sank the last Republican health care push — is the target of new ads in Washington and at home urging him to reject the Graham-Cassidy bill, too.
Save My Care, a progressive group defending Obamacare, expanded its campaign against the health care bill drafted by Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy with a six-figure television and digital advertising buy aimed at McCain on Wednesday.
The ads’ approach: Flattery.
Both open by crediting McCain — who is undergoing treatment for brain cancer — for his dramatic return to the Senate to cast the third “no” vote against an earlier Republican attempt to repeal Obamacare this summer. The week of that vote McCain also gave a sharp speech condemning the effort to push the bill through the Senate without committee hearings and regular procedures.
“Sen. McCain, millions of Americans are counting on you to keep your word,” the narrator of the 30-second spot airing in DC says.
“We’re counting on you to stand up for Arizona families again,” a separate Arizona version says.
The new ads come the day after Save My Care went on the air urging Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Maine Sen. Susan Collins and West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito to oppose the bill.
McCain and Murkowski are increasingly the focus of Senate aides and lobbyists involved in the health care battle on Capitol Hill. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul and Collins are seen as more likely to oppose the bill — which would leave Republicans without a single vote to spare.
McCain’s best friend, Graham, is a co-author of the bill. And it has the support of Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey.
But — like the Republican measure he condemned in July — it has not advanced through regular order.
McCain on Tuesday mocked the Senate finance committee’s decision to hold a last-minute hearing on the Graham-Cassidy bill next week.
“I always thought regular order was hearings and debates and amendments and into the floor with debates and discussion and amendments. That’s what I thought regular order was,” McCain said.
Still, he was noncommittal on the bill. McCain said he would only support the new plan if he received “enough assurance that the bill would help my state of Arizona.”