In A Bit Of News That Will Surprise No One…
…John McCain is one step closer to declaring his candidacy:
ABC News has learned that Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his political team have decided it’s full steam ahead for his 2008 presidential campaign though he has yet to make the final, official decision.
Sources close to McCain say on Wednesday in Phoenix, he and a half dozen of his top aides huddled and decided to proceed more formally with his quest for the White House.
McCain told ABC News that his team will continue to meet and “go through the process of decision making.” But, he added, “I certainly haven’t made any decision.”
A presidential exploratory committee is expected to be set up this month — perhaps as early as next week.
McCain’s official, final decision will likely not come until after the Christmas holidays, after he’s had a chance to talk it over with his wife, Cindy.
Among his seven children, Jimmy is at boot camp at Camp Pendleton; Jack is at the Naval Academy; and daughter Megan is in her senior year at Columbia University.
In the meantime, McCain’s team is exploring office space in Virginia, hiring staff and building infrastructure in key early-primary states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
If Rudy runs, he will be the man to beat, but in his absence, it’s McCain…
If McCain is the nominee, it may be the first time in my life that I will not vote for president. I guess I could vote Libertarian. McCain is the biggest traitor to free speech in the nation’s history and will never get my vote, and I will discourage others from voting for him.
I’m not happy about the McCain/Feingold law either, but a Libertarian vote or non-vote is a vote for Hillary/Gore/Feingold/Kerry or whatever other tax & spend liberal comes along. Just a thought.
The depression over recent political comeuppances, especially Rummy’s departure, is just lifting and now this news. Good grief, is there a 12-step program somewhere out there?
I will never ‘not vote’. I will also never vote for McCain. This is not hyperbole. With Hillary et al. we know what we’d be getting; with McCain we’d never have a clue.
I suspect his exploratory efforts will lead to the decision not to run because there are many more conservatives who will never vote for McCain.
Sandy, That kind of rationale just handed the congress and the senate back to Nancy Pelosi and Dick Durbin. Despite your disagreements with him, and possibly even your disgust with him, you are certainly in greater agreement with John McCain than you are with the DNC. If you do, in fact, sit out the election in order to show your disgust with John McCain, or push for a GOP candidate with less national appeal than McCain, just because he is distasteful to you, and as a result of your actions and the actions of those with similar opinions, you forefit any credibility in complaining about the results of that election.
Listen, McCain has done some stupid things. He’s done some things I don’t like. I don’t like McCain/Feingold. I don’t like his prickliness over the detainee issue. I wish he would have seen the wisdom of supply-side tax cuts sooner than 2005 (however, I did like that he was able to admit that the tax cuts did, in fact, do what they were intended to do). But that stuff is just window dressing compared to the great issue of our time – the war. McCain has been possibly the most hawkish member of congress ever since the war began. He is an unabashed supporter of the Iraq war, and has ever advocated other military actions in addition to Iraq (see, for instance, his op-ed, co-authored with Bob Dole, about Sudan. Sorry, I don’t have a link). In my estimation, McCain is the only person out there with enough vision to continue to abide by and implement the Bush Doctrine after Bush is gone. I like Rudy, I like Mitt, but McCain is the only one out there with the record to prove that, when Bush goes, his grand strategy for fighting the war won’t go with him. There are other issues, such as entitlement reform and balancing the budget, that make him a worthy GOP nominee, but all of this is small potatoes compared to the war. We need a hawk’s hawk in the White House after Bush leaves town, and the only person with a 25-year record of that is John McCain.
Collin, sounds like you work for McCain. The bottom line is this; the primaries are the place for this argument. There is where you make your case for who should get the nomination. I can’t see McCain getting the nomination. He’s got independent appeal but he’s pissed off his base over and over and over. I’m not crazy about McCain or Rudy, but I’d hit the pavement for either of them over any of these loony Dems.
Don’t work for him, just like him.
You made a very good point. Battle this out in the primaries. If McCain can prove to the base that their worst fears about him are overblown, he should be able to get the nomination. If he’s not able to convince the GOP voters that his attributes outweigh his liabilities, he’ll lose. I know I’ll be supporting the eventual nominee, whoever that is. I just hope that the rabid McCain haters will be able to do the same if he ends up getting the nod.
If this election was any indication, I doubt it. Despite our hopes that the R-base would come home, it doesn’t look like that happened and we lost. Winning elections matters. The Left figured that out, opened up their ranks to more conservative Dems ,and as a result, control Congress. Anyone really think that these “conservative dems” are not going to vote party line when it really matters? Unfortunately, some on the Right will be willing to shun a candidate that they agree with some of the time, and consequently allow victory for a candidate that they agree with none of the time. They’ll vote Libertarian in 2008 and go to bed with their pride…but they’ll wake up with another President Clinton.
Colin, I probably wasn’t clear enough – typing between clenched teeth is never easy. I really meant I would never fail to vote. It is the most precious right and I’ve always participated in elections, whether living in or out of the U.S.A. and voting absentee.
Our recent Texas gubernatorial choices included KinkyBloodyFriedman, so I know a difficult choice when I see one. However, McCain is not a choice at all and I truly believe he and his team will determine there are not nearly enough voters willing to support his candidacy.
You support McCain because of his hawkish stance on the war and his vision to continue to abide by and implement the Bush Doctrine. I think he tried to micromanage the war, from day 1, and the Bush Doctrine will become the McCain Doctrine (whatever that may be) if he is elected. I’m not particularly objective (even rational at this point) about Rummy’s departure, but McCain was one of the early snipers.
I hope these links work (I’m not Techo-Woman) and that they help you understand why I will never vote for McCain.
http://levin.nationalreview.com/archives/095053.asp
http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110006736
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/26/AR2005052601536_pf.html
http://www.nypost.com/php/pfriendly/pfriendly_new.php
http://mccain.senate.gov/index/cfm?fuseaction=NewsCenter.ViewPressRelease&Content_id=1654
Hope these links somehow work because Levin, Noonan, Krauthammer, Sager and McCain himself express my sentiments.
I like McCain, but I do think he’s less electable than many think.
Ideally, the most electable candidate is one who can attract members of the opposing party’s coalition, while holding down the more dissatisfied voters in your own camp. McCain has a genuine appeal to the former group, particularly among hawkish TNR-style Democrats (even if TNR itself does what it always does and endorses a Democrat in ’08), old-school New England Rockefeller Republicans (who have long since abandoned the Republican Party and are now generally Democrat) and Hispanic voters.
However, McCain has real problems with social conservatives, libertarians and (what I call) the Perot Independants. And, while animosity towards the Democratic Party will probably keep social conservatives in the Republican tent the next cycle, the same cannot be said about the other two groups.
Gerryg’s views sum up what a lot of libertarians feel about McCain and, while I don’t share his view that McCain is ultimately unnaceptable, it does point to a real problem for McCain in November. Even worse, Libertarian support for the Republican Party has seriously eroded under Bush, to the point where many voted for Kerry in ’04 and Democrat this year. If those voters aren’t brought back into the fold, they could be out of the coalition permanently.
Moreover McCain’s support of the “path to citizenship” has caused the Perot Independants to turn from one of McCain’s biggest supporters to, in many cases, very harsh critics. And while his views are no different than Democrats on immigration, the PI voters tend to be isolationist in foreign policy as well, which won’t bode particuarly well for McCain.
This is why I think Giuliani is a much more electable choice. His appeal to Democrats is almost as strong as McCain’s (and he already has a reputation for being a partisan, so he won’t lose as much “soft” Dem support as the election heats up and the mudslining starts), and he seems to be considered acceptable by the Perot Independants and very well liked by Libertarians, notwithstanding his gun control views while Mayor of NYC. He has the same problem McCain does with social conservatives, but the social conservative voters seem to genuinely like him, which will neutralize his problems somewhat. Moreover, the social conservatives, unlike independants and libertarians, really don’t have anywhere else to go, so he wouldn’t cause as many defections as McCain would.
No way mcCain wins… I’ll give my last dime to keep him from the WH.
Whatever you think of McCain, he remains the front-runner bec’ he’s more conservative than Rudy, so he’ll win the Republican primaries, and he’s more liberal than Romney or Brownback and therefore more electable in a general election.