McCain Deems 1983 Vote Against MLK Day a 'Mistake'

John McCain apologized today for his 1983 Senate vote against a federal Martin Luther King holiday. Standing at the Memphis site where King was assassinated in 1968, McCain called his nay vote “a mistake,” the Memphis Commercial Appeal reports; McCain later voted for a state holiday in Arizona. Democrat Hillary Clinton, also in Memphis today, recalled meeting King as a teenager.

Clinton echoed King's efforts to remedy economic injustices, calling for a White House appointee tasked with fighting poverty. Barack Obama, in Indiana, also spoke on the civil-rights leader today, saying that, “instead of having a politics that lives up to Dr. King’s call for unity, we’ve had a politics that’s used race to drive us apart.” (More Martin Luther King Jr. stories.)