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Reports keep surfacing that John McCain admitted shortly after the 2000 election that he did not vote for President Bush, even as the Arizona senator and his campaign reject the claims outright.

“It’s nonsense,” McCain told reporters Friday in Jersey City, N.J.

“Of course (I voted for him),” he told FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly Thursday. “And I voted … for Bush in 2000 and 2004.

“And not only that, far more important than a vote — I campaigned everywhere in America for him,” he said. “And I enjoyed it. I campaigned with him. I did everything I could to get him elected and re elected president.”

The presumptive GOP nominee defended himself after Arianna Huffington wrote in The Huffington Post Monday that McCain and his wife Cindy told her at a Los Angeles dinner party shortly after the 2000 election that neither of them voted for Bush. She wrote that Cindy McCain even said she voted for her husband as a write-in candidate.

The Los Angeles Times then claimed Wednesday that an anonymous source who attended the dinner confirmed the Cindy McCain account.

And Friday, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported two “West Wing” actors heard the same thing from the Arizona senator — only their version of the story was a little different.

According to the Post, actor Bradley Whitford said McCain told a group of people at the Hollywood dinner that Bush was “horribly unqualified and untested.”

Asked if he supported Bush, McCain then “put his finger up to his lips, shook his head and mouthed, ‘No way,’ ” according to Whitford.

Actor Richard Schiff gave a similar account. Neither remembered Cindy McCain describing how she voted.

Click here to read the latest account of the Hollywood dinner with McCain in The Washington Post.

FOX News’ Mosheh Oinounou contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON — Organized labor is paying more attention to Republican John McCain as Democrat Barack Obama solidifies his status as the front-runner in the Democratic contest against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The AFL-CIO, which has not endorsed anyone in the Democratic primary, announced Wednesday that it is sending more than 6,000 of its people to more than 22 states during the next two weekends to talk to more than 200,000 union voters about McCain.

“Senator McCain’s economic path would lead to disaster for America’s working families,” said John Sweeney, president of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest labor organization.

Meanwhile, the nation’s largest union, the Service Employees International Union, is increasing its focus on the likely Republican presidential nominee. The union’s political action committee is already running commercials critical of McCain’s health care plan.

The SEIU, which endorsed Obama, has called the Illinois senator “the presumptive nominee.”

“We’ve had a long process and the outcome is now clear,” said Anna Burger, the SEIU’s secretary treasurer. “The Democratic Party should come together to focus on winning in November.”

But Clinton’s union supporters say they’re solidly behind her.

If the New York senator can win in West Virginia, Kentucky, Oregon and Puerto Rico — the next four of the six remaining primaries — then she can make a case to the Democratic superdelegates that she’s the best candidate, said Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

“The end of the road is not winning the nomination,” McEntee said. “The end of the road is getting the victory in November … We just believe Obama has a higher mountain to climb than Clinton to beat McCain.”

Some of Clinton’s most powerful union supporters — AFSCME, the American Federation of Teachers and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers — have re-declared their allegiance to Clinton and said they would continue to work for her.

“The answer is that the fighting Machinists are still fighting,” IAM spokesman Rick Sloan said. “Full speed ahead!”

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John McCain, appearing to accept Barack Obama as his likely opponent in November, told FOX News’ Bill O’Reilly on Thursday that he will run his general election campaign by exploiting what he sees as the Illinois senator’s “inexperience and lack of judgment.”

The Arizona senator suggested Obama’s willingness to hold talks with nations like Iran and his light record on national security, along with his tax-raising proposals, will lead to his electoral undoing in the fall.

“So I think it’s inexperience and judgment and vision … for the future of this country. And I think that’s what this campaign is gonna be all about,” McCain said when asked what he sees as Obama’s biggest weakness.

“If you are gonna sit down with someone like (Mahmoud) Ahmadinejad, who … says they are gonna quote ‘wipe Israel off the map,’ then you enhance their prestige,” he said. “The same thing if you want to talk to Mr. (Hugo) Chavez. The same thing if you want to talk to Raul Castro, who was the henchman in Cuba and still is for many, many years.”

McCain’s appraisal of Obama followed the Illinois senator’s double-digit victory in the North Carolina primary Tuesday and his narrow loss to Hillary Clinton in Indiana.

Sen. Obama’s performance put him within striking distance of the Democratic nomination and has led several pundits and prominent Democrats to declare he is McCain’s inevitable challenger, though Clinton is pledging to fight the race to the finish.

McCain told FOX News the persistent controversy over Obama’s former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however, will not be a focal point of his campaign.

McCain walked a fine line when asked about the criticism he’s taken over one of his own pastor supporters — John Hagee. Hagee has come under fire for attempting to link the Roman Catholic Church to the rise of the Nazis and for suggesting Catholicism is a “false cult system.”

“Reverend Hagee is a man who is committed to the state of Israel. He has done a lot of good things,” McCain said. “I do not embrace a view that he stated about … the Catholic Church. I steadfastly rejected and repudiated (that view). I have never been in Pastor Hagee’s church. I know him. But the fact is that I accept his endorsement.”

The presumptive GOP nominee also renewed his call for “comprehensive immigration reform,” saying the country still needs to secure its borders, enact a temporary worker program and deal with the millions of illegal immigrants already in the United States in a “humane” fashion.

Though McCain has taken heat from conservatives for his failed efforts to push an immigration package with Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, Mass., that they said amounted to amnesty, McCain said Thursday he would not tolerate so-called sanctuary cities — cities that encourage a hands-off approach to local enforcement of federal immigration laws.

“I am opposed to sanctuary cities,” McCain said. “But the sanctuary city problem solves itself when you have comprehensive immigration reform.”

Clinton told O’Reilly a week ago that she would not crack down on sanctuary cities.

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Just what did Barack Obama mean when he said John McCain was “losing his bearings?”

The two campaigns got in a strange tussle Thursday night over those words, with the McCain camp accusing Obama of taking a cheap shot at the Arizona senator’s age.

Obama used that phrase during an interview with CNN, when he accused McCain of trying to smear him by suggesting that Hamas preferred Obama for president.

McCain adviser Mark Salter swiftly sent out a lengthy memo claiming Obama was trying to divert attention from real issues by resorting to ageism.

“He used the words ‘losing his bearings’ intentionally, a not-particularly-clever way of raising John McCain’s age as an issue,” Salter said. “This is typical of the Obama style of campaigning.”

The expected Republican presidential nominee turns 72 in August, and would be the oldest person sworn in as president if elected.

But the Obama campaign did a double-take at Salter’s memo, which the campaign dubbed a “rant.”

“Clearly losing one’s bearings has no relation to age, given this bizarre rant that Mark Salter just sent out,” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said. “It’s clear why a candidate offering a third term of George Bush’s disastrous economic policies and failed strategy in Iraq would want to distract and attack, but it’s not the kind of campaign John McCain has promised the American people that he would run.”

At the root of the dispute is McCain’s decision to call attention to a Hamas adviser’s apparent affinity for Obama. The adviser, Ahmed Yousef, said in a recent interview: “We like Obama and hope that he will win the election.”

McCain used those comments in a fundraising appeal and has cited them in interviews.

Asked about the matter Wednesday during a taping of “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart,” McCain said: “It’s indicative of how some of our enemies view America. And I guarantee you, they’re not going to endorse me.”

In Obama’s CNN interview, he accused McCain of engaging in a smear campaign.

“This is offensive, and I think it’s disappointing, because John McCain always says, ‘Well, I’m not going to run that kind of politics.’ And then to engage in that kind of smear, I think, is unfortunate, particularly since my policy toward Hamas has been no different than his,” Obama said.

The Illinois senator added: “For him to toss out comments like that, I think, is an example of him losing his bearings as he pursues this nomination. We don’t need name-calling in this debate.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Col. George "Bud" Day speaks about his time in captivity with John McCain.

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John McCain rarely speaks about his experiences as a POW in Vietnam, but one of his cell mates at the Hanoi Hilton on Thursday described some of the conditions and character traits that earned McCain the commendations he received for his war service.

Col. George “Bud” Day, 83, is the most decorated service man since Gen. Douglas MacArthur, with more than 70 medals. A living legend, Day was blown out of the sky two months to the day before the North Vietnamese shot down a propaganda prize, whose father and grandfather were renowned American admirals.

“They told me we were gonna get a roommate and it was gonna be the prince. The Vietnamese called him the prince so I asked my nurse what was his name? They said John McCain,” Day told FOX News.

Both he and McCain were taken captive in 1967, and held until their release in 1973.

Day said the first time he saw McCain, he believed the future senator was close to death and that the only reason for the chance encounter was part of a Vietnamese ploy to break the morale of U.S. servicemen already in captivity.

“I took one look at him, and my brain instantly said, ‘They dropped this guy off on me to claim that we let him die,’” Day said. “He was just emaciated. Very, very skinny, in this full body cast. Just filthy.”

The U.S. soldiers were held sometimes five to a cell, barely big enough for two.

“He had this gimpy knee where he’d busted his knee, this arm had been fractured in a couple places, he’d been bayoneted in the leg, this arm was out at the shoulder and, in fact, during that time it was out at the shoulder so long it wore a hole in this bone,” Day said.

During captivity, they were tortured mercilessly, Day said, describing one tactic that McCain has also recalled.

“They roped me under the arms, tied my hands behind my back, ran another rope to that, got me up on a chair, threw that rope up over a rafter and jerked the chair out from under me and your own weight just tears your body apart,” he said.

Day’s broken arm was re-broken during torture so he would never fly again. McCain played physical therapist.

“John said, ‘Well we’ll gather up some bamboo, and he was in a bandage on his leg at that time. So I got some strips of bamboo, smuggled them into the room, John put his foot in my arm pit and pulled on my wrist ’till we could get the bone forced back down … it wasn’t exactly perfect but it worked out he got it back to where it was functional,” Day said.

But nerve damage was extensive — his crushed hands were useless. Meanwhile, McCain was treated no better than the trash they were fed in the form of a soup.

“I mean you could smell him for 25 feet. Bunch of food and nasty stuff in his hair, and down his neck and inside his cast. The cast was not lined so every time he would move inside this cast, it was just eating a hole in his arm or his elbow or someplace, and he was just in — he was in pain,” Day recalled.

Yet McCain, now 71, made efforts to help Day recover from his own injuries, Day said.

Day said he had limited use of his arms, which was a result of a combination of torture and the initial plane crash that put him in the hands of his captors — an ordeal that earned Day the Congressional Medal of Honor.

“And when I finally did regain use of that, it was after months and months of dragging this hand and finger on the wall of the prison cell,” Day said, walking his fingers up the air like he did many years ago.

“John would help me. … John would pull my fingers out straight. They would just instantly recurl. And finally, one morning, I had just the slightest bit of movement in this hand — finger — and we both cried,” Day said.

McCain, whose military record was released to the Associated Press on Wednesday, received 17 commendations over his career from 1951-81. They included the Silver Star for his conduct in captivity. He also received the Legion of Merit, the Distinguished Flying Cross and a Bronze Star.

Day said by any humane standard, McCain would have been a good candidate for early release from the camp, but that wasn’t in his playbook.

“It also wasn’t in his playbook to die. In fact he quickly became a leader.”

Day said he asked McCain if he would be one of his preachers.

“He said sure. He had a great handle on the Episcopalian liturgy, he could just repeat it verbatim,” he said.

But repeating what he went through during his incarceration is something McCain almost never does as a presidential candidate. Day said he thinks he should.

“I’ve never seen any shortcomings or any shortfall out of him talking about that, but he just doesn’t trade on that. I think he feels that it’s wrong to trade on being a hero, but he is,” Day said.

Click here to watch Day’s interview with FOX News.

FOX News’ Carl Cameron contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON — Cindy McCain says she will never make her tax returns public even if her husband wins the White House and she becomes the first lady.

“You know, my husband and I have been married 28 years and we have filed separate tax returns for 28 years. This is a privacy issue. My husband is the candidate,” Cindy McCain, wife of Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting John McCain, said in an interview aired on NBC’s “Today” on Thursday.

Asked if she would release her tax returns if she was first lady, Cindy McCain said: “No.”

The Arizona senator released his tax return last month, reporting he had a total income of $405,409 in 2007 and paid $84,460 in federal income taxes. He files his return separately from his wife, an heiress to a Phoenix-based beer distributing company whose fortune is in the $100 million range.

Sen. McCain is routinely is ranked among the richest lawmakers in Congress, but he and his wife have kept their finances separate throughout their marriage. A prenuptial agreement left much of the family’s assets in Cindy McCain’s name.

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Cindy McCain’s refusal to release her tax returns gives the appearance of a double standard on the part of her husband.

“What is John McCain trying to hide?” Dean said in a statement. “Throughout this campaign, he has acted like his own calls for openness and accountability apply to everyone but himself. Now he thinks he can bring that same double standard to the White House.”

Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton filed joint tax returns with their spouses and publicly released those returns.