Posted on 03/13/2006 9:38:25 AM PST by presidio9
The political landscape may be shifting in ways that would make it easier for Sen. John McCain of Arizona to win the 2008 Republican presidential nomination. He's among several potential candidates courting Southern and Midwest Republicans this weekend in Memphis, Tenn., in the first chance that party insiders have had to look at several would-be nominees in one place. Conventional wisdom — that McCain could win the general election but not the Republican nomination because conservatives oppose him — may be changing. A convergence of three new forces could be reshaping the landscape just as Republicans begin deciding who will lead their party: • First is a rising contempt in the heartland for politics as usual in Washington, D.C. That could help the maverick senator, who frequently reaches across party lines. • Second, many economic conservatives are shifting their emphasis from tax reductions to spending cuts, a McCain strength. • Third, charges of corruption against Republicans in Congress could cost the party seats next fall and add luster to McCain's carefully groomed image as a reformer. The most significant change in Republican politics, of course, is the decline of President Bush's standing in the opinion polls. Not only does that help explain the growing willingness of congressional Republicans to defy the president on some questions, it also underscores why McCain — often Bush's nemesis — may benefit from the president's shifting fortunes. McCain can play both sides of this phenomenon.
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Some conservatives also take issue with McCain's role in a bipartisan "Gang of 14" senators who let Democrats retain the power to filibuster judicial nominees, even though they facilitated Senate approval of several nominees who previously had been blocked, and his proposed restrictions on lobbying.
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(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
Where are the barf bags?
I believe all the MSM bluster about his candidacy is just that. MSM bluster.
I love these sweeping statements based on no one ever asking me.
"But conservative wing could deny him party's nomination"
So we're just a "wing" of the party now?
Sadly, that's about the size of it.
Hilarious! There is not much "reaching" necessary, RINO McCain always votes with the rats.
Translation: Some of the Bushbots have embraced McCain as "winnable".
Translation: Some of the Bushbots have embraced McCain as "winnable".
**
Best article summary I have seen in a long, long time.
Exactly right, only he is also the product of this picture.
No one asked me either. But it's still a two party system and I hate to say that I'll vote for him if I absolutely HAVE to...but in my guts I know he's nuts and I can't imagine voting for any Democrat. Further, I'm too old to fall for the third party scam.
We need a new ABM treaty. Anybody But McCain.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j022300.html...............
Carol McCain waited for the return of her husband from his Vietnamese captivity for five and a half long years; as McCain idolator David Grann put it in the New Republic, she was "a kind of modern-day Penelope to McCain's Odysseus." She carried her burden with nobility, and resolve, staying faithful to the man she refused to believe she had lost – even in the face of her own tragedy. It was Christmas Eve, 1969, while driving along a snowbound street, that she went crashing into a telephone pole: the impact hurled her through the windshield. She lost her left leg, ruptured her spleen, and went through a long series of agonizingly painful operations. Before the accident, she had been a statuesque beauty who worked as a model; she came out of it with four inches subtracted from her height, broken in body – but not in spirit. Her love for her war hero husband forbade her from letting him know anything of her condition: he knew nothing of the accident, and she refused to write him about it since it would only make his burden heavier.
THE RETURN OF THE INGRATE
Any man would be lucky to have such a fierce, unbending love: she stuck by him, agitating for his release, and living for the day of his return. Her devotion was repaid with rejection. He learned of her accident on the plane home, and wasted no time in getting rid of her. He was soon back to his old tricks of playing the field – "just as he had at the Naval Academy," says Grann – and soon sought a divorce. He openly acknowledges that his behavior was solely responsible for the break-up of his marriage, and seems to glory in the macho role while simultaneously professing at least some sense of remorse: "I think she has reason to be bitter," McCain told one interviewer.
AN ALBATROSS
As for Carol, she avers that "the breakup of our marriage was not caused by my accident or Vietnam or any of those things. I don't know that it might not have happened if John had never been gone. I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else." This doesn't sound like bitterness; it is more like benevolence, in that it gives her ex-husband the benefit of a doubt and seems to excuse his disloyalty as practically hormonal, or at least fated. A less charitable – and more realistic – appraisal of McCain's motives is that he might have found his physically-impaired spouse more of an albatross than an asset for a man intent on a political career.
I won't vote for him, period.
I'll support him, if he wins the primaries. He and Rudy are the two strongest candidates right now. I'd be very happy with ticket having some combination of McCain, Rudy, or Condi.
"Could deny"? You mean "SHOULD deny". I don't want this RINO anywhere near the Oval Office.
The word.....NEVER under any circumstances....comes to mind.
I'll write in someone instead.
Keating is why the liberal media so desperately wants McCain to be the republican candidate. They know that McCain never successfully answered those charges.
For me, McCain is unacceptable because of CFR.
I think that Christian conservatives need to come together over a single candidate earlier than usual this time around. Frist is a good choice, Allen is a good choice, and Jeb Bush is a good choice. All the others are pretenders.
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