McCain Owes an Apology of His Own

I first met McCain in the late 1990s, when I worked for The Arizona Republic. Back then, McCain often referred to his level of Hispanic support -- which was north of 50 percent in his re-election campaigns -- as an "honor." I wrote a column saying that someone who spent five and a half years as a POW probably does not take such a word lightly.

But in 2010, after losing the Hispanic vote two years earlier to Barack Obama -- who had a much thinner record of serving Latino constituents -- and abandoning his own immigration bill, the senator was in a tight re-election campaign against J.D. Hayworth, a former congressman turned right-wing radio host. McCain enthusiastically voiced support for Arizona's heavy-handed immigration law. The statute, many provisions of which were later struck down by the Supreme Court, required the profiling of Hispanics -- more than 70 percent of whom opposed the law.

Even after McCain won re-election, he couldn't shake the nativist virus that had infected him. In June 2011, McCain blamed some Arizona wildfires on illegal immigrants. The culprits turned out to be U.S. citizens who had gone camping.

Just last year, McCain -- echoing the words of Hillary Clinton, among others -- demanded that the United States send back tens of thousands of women and children from Central America. This, despite the fact that many of them feared that they would be killed if they returned home. Calling the influx a "humanitarian and security crisis on our southern border," McCain proposed revising or repealing a 2008 law that made it more difficult to remove refugees from Central America without putting them before a judge.

As far as many Hispanics are concerned, the old John McCain is gone. The straight-talking maverick who boldly stood up to the extremists is now a political opportunist who is short on compassion and long on cynicism. That may be the nature of politics. But it's certainly not heroic.

Regardless of Trump's comments about what happened in Vietnam, McCain owes Hispanics an apology for what happened in Arizona. Let's hear it.

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Ruben Navarrette's email address is ruben@rubennavarrette.com.