When Does John Mccain Run Again
John McCain had then perfected the art of the narrow escape, in politics and in life, that it was almost possible to believe he might defy the odds i more time.
During the 2008 campaign, when his bid for the Republican presidential nomination imploded months before any actual voting, the Arizona senator was out of money and on the unpopular side of the mean solar day'south big issue, the war in Republic of iraq. Just he wasn't set to quit.
He decided to make his stand in New Hampshire, a country with politics as iconoclastic as he was. His forepart-runner entourage was gone, replaced by a single aide and a borrowed SUV. The first result of his stripped-downwardly campaign was at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Concord. In his new volume, he likened the political reporters gathered in the back of the ballroom to "crows on a wire, watching the unfortunate roadkill exhale its last earlier they descended to scavenge the remains."
He wasn't incorrect. I was roofing the July 2007 speech for USA TODAY. Nosotros were watching to see whether he actually planned to stay in the race that he had mismanaged to date — and, if so, how in the world he planned to turn things around.
"Under what scenario would you lot suspend your campaign?" I asked him during a press scrum that followed his luncheon speech — which had been devoted, of form, to defending his stance on Iraq. He looked at me equally though I had asked the dumbest question imaginable. (To exist off-white, this is a look he often gave reporters, not to mention some fellow senators. The occasional president, also.) "Only if I succumb to a fatal disease before the 24-hour interval of the New Hampshire primary," he replied.
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He didn't suspend his entrada, of course. He concluded up winning the chief in New Hampshire, which propelled him to win next big contest, in Due south Carolina. Eventually, he claimed the Republican nomination, the prize that had eluded him 8 years earlier. He would lose the general election in November to Barack Obama, but he didn't quit. Not then. Non ever.
In the end, McCain's battle with brain cancer was ane fight he didn't win, just then again he saw no shame in losing, but in non trying. In The Restless Wave, the book he co-authored with Mark Salter that was published in May, he praised those who pursued "the hardest causes," who refused to acknowledge even certain defeat. "They don't despair," he said. "They persist."
The larger-than-life figures in Washington tend to exist presidents. There have just been 45 of them in the nation's history, later all. Merely at that place are a handful of others who by dint of character or vision or achievement or personal history get influential beyond the item task they held, who get iconic. Ted Kennedy, for one. John Lewis. Robert Dole. Eleanor Roosevelt.
And John Sidney McCain 3.
Part of that was his story of survival through 5 years every bit a pw in Vietnam, emerging with lifelong concrete scars merely a spirit that remained remarkably ebullient. That cruel feel gave him the moral authorization to speak out when the argue turned to such questions as the use of torture. Function of information technology were his credentials as a maverick — his willingness to break with his ain party, and to forge alliances across partisan lines. He stubbornly stuck with his positions on issues, particularly on national security, even when they became inconvenient.
He was inappreciably perfect. He could exist caustic. His anger could wink, raising questions even amongst some admirers about whether he had the right temperament to exist president. He was 1 of the and then-chosen Keating 5, senators enmeshed in a savings-and-loan scandal, though the Senate Ideals Commission found him guilty only of poor judgment, not of wrongdoing.
That said, John McCain was almost impossible not to like. He was smart and funny and a principal storyteller, and he nursed only a scattering of grudges. McCain rarely ducked reporters, even when he knew the questions they were going to enquire would be uncomfortable, and even though he thought news coverage in 2008 was tilted to favor Obama. Baltimore Sunday reporter Robert Timberg wrote a searingly honest portrait of McCain and four other Naval University graduates; McCain was 1 of just two of the v who showed upward for the book party when The Nightingale's Song was published. Xx-one years after, the senator spoke at the memorial service for Timberg, himself an Annapolis grad.
During the 2016 campaign, when Donald Trump was on the ascent, I interviewed McCain for The states TODAY's Capital Download newsmaker series. He questioned Trump's credentials on national security, but refused to say he wouldn't vote for him over Hillary Clinton. "I vote for the Republican nominee, plainly," he said, although he didn't audio happy about it. Trump already had made clear his ain disdain for McCain.
Last yr, I talked to McCain again, at an off-the-record dinner with a group of Washington Bureau chiefs. He had merely returned from a tour that took him from Commonwealth of australia to Vietnam to Singapore. Leaders from those countries had peppered him with questions about the perplexing new U.S. president. The senator was at a loss to explain President Trump'due south friendly view of Vladimir Putin, just he had tried to be reassuring, talking about the strength of American institutions.
Sitting by his side that night, I idea McCain seemed to be missing a step. A few days before, he had stumbled in questioning former FBI director James Comey at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing. At the dinner, he looked wearied; he repeated a story twice without realizing information technology. One month later on, he was diagnosed with the brain cancer that would take his life.
Even and then, Susan Goldberg of National Geographic, who before that evening had never before met with McCain in person, was enchanted. After he left, she said, "Wasn't he astonishing?"
Yes. Yes, he was.
Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/08/25/john-mccain-lost-presidency-but-larger-than-life-figure-anyway/658733002/