If you want to win an election to the nation’s highest office there are few better choices to get help from than somebody who has walked that road before you. That’s why Mitt Romney has been exceptionally lucky to have Senator John McCain as one of his campaign surrogates. They’ve gone head to head against each other and McCain has had the full experience of running up against the Obama campaign machine. And now he can lend his guidance, support and public endorsement of Romney’s candidacy and be there to celebrate any bits of good news coming Mitt’s way. Such as the recent announcement that Sheldon Adelson would be lending his financial backing to the effort. Take it away, John.

Senator and Romney presidential campaign surrogate John McCain (R-AZ) said Thursday that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is indirectly injecting millions of dollar in Chinese “foreign money” into Mitt Romney’s presidential election effort.

“Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau, which says that obviously, maybe in a roundabout way foreign money is coming into an American political campaign,” McCain said in an interview on PBS’s News Hour.

“That is a great deal of money, and we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization… that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and corporations are not people,” he said.

Moments like this are precisely why I invented the #HeadDesk hashtag on Twiter.

OK… I get that John McCain is still in favor of campaign finance reform and that’s his right. But if he’s going to agree to be a campaign surrogate for Romney, you’d think he might put this on the back burner for a bit while we get on with the business of the election. Heck, he can still support the idea without coming out and directly torpedoing somebody who is kicking in toward the effort.

Obama’s surrogates have already realized that money is speech and American Bridge is hard at work raising cash for them. If you want to change the system, work to do that. But until the change is in place we all have to play by the rules on the field. McCain needs to step back a few paces and figure out which side of the Long Ball game he’s on.