Republican presidential candidate John McCain was accompanied by his 95-year-old mother on a campaign swing to eastern Iowa on Thursday.
During a stop in Davenport, McCain touted the success of the "surge" of U.S. troops into Iraq and he faulted the Iraqi government for lack of progress in Iraq. "The Maliki government is not functioning as effectively as we want it to but I’d like to point out there (are) no Thomas Jeffersons in Iraq. Any time somebody popped their head up under Saddam Hussein, they got it chopped off," McCain said. "The hardest thing as we found out after the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union was for countries to adopt democracy."
Diane Hummel, a mother of nine from Davenport, doesn’t yet know if she’ll caucus for McCain, but Hummel says she respects his character. "I just think he’s very honest, with integrity, and he’s got everything. He’s pro-life, too," she says. "I was thinking about (Rudy) Giuliani, but he’s not pro-life and that’s it. He lost it for me."