I'm sorry, but with all the talk about a Kerry/McCain ticket being a Bush-killer combination, I think that this makes Kerry look very, very foolish.
In 2004, McCain still had backbone and was not a GOP patsy yet. His presence on the Kerry ticket would have been huge.
I always assumed that Kerry's long delay in choosing a running mate was due to HIS approaching McCain about joining and McCain using this to negotiate with the GOP -- I always thought that Rove promised McCain the 2008 GOP nomination to keep him in the fold.
Now we hear that he came to us? Big mistake to give up a ticket that showed true non-partisan rejection of Bush's 1st term idiocy.
I was never a big Kerry fan, and this makes him look even less insightful, even less innovative, even less independent of the Dem machine, and even less impressive to me.
I'm wondering the same things. Maybe McCain was only using the threat of defection to extract a promise of support in 2008 from Rove? Maybe McCain asked for more than Kerry felt he could give up in good conscience? I'd like to know more details.
How could McCain POSSIBLY be a team player had Kerry begun to withdraw troops which even in '04 he hinted he would do? There's also the fact that Kerry knows McCain better than any of us, having worked with him in the Senate for years. Perhaps what he knows about him automatically precludes him from consideration of being one heartbeat away from the presidency.
I have read of his bad temper and the fact that he was unbelievably rude to a German delegation (in a New Yorker article). McCain has, um, issues, which is why, apart from ideological circumstances, he would be a risky president.
I don't agree with your assessment at all. Especially since perhaps, McCain made demands that were an absolute deal breaker.
I understand your concerns, but I really wonder what portion of your assessment relies on the principle of the pre-defined outcome.
I am not confident at all that McCain's politics would be the same today if he were in his first term as VP under Kerry. I suspect that McCain felt in 2004 that he simply could not survive as a politician on the fence. He had to decide which camp to go with. It seems now that he asked to join the Dems, and we shunned him, driving him into the Bush camp. He knew that he had to be a Bush-team player, and, to his "credit" (in a Machiavellian way), he has held up his end of that deal with the devil.
I personally believe that the Democratic Party is strong enough to survive intense debate on priciples and platform. I disagreed with Dean when he apologized for inviting southerners with gun racks and the Southern Cross flag to vote for him -- votes are votes: we don't move forward by preaching to the choir. I say let them in and then they'll change.
Same goes for McCain: I think that Kerry made a huge error by rejecting McCain's overtures. A cross party ticket would have been the very thing to combat the über-partisan Bush "with-us-or-against-us," "dissent-equals-treason" craziness.
JMHO.
I think he was pretty much a patsy in '04
