I mentioned a few minutes back that Senators aren't your first choice when you want to win the presidency. Democrats had the last sitting Senator elected in JFK back in 1960.
If I asked you who was the last Republican Senator to get elected out of the Senate to Whitehouse, would you be able to say who that was without looking it up? I couldn't. Turns out it was William Harding. He died just 2.5 years into his term, and wasn't nearly as old as John McCain. Harding was 55 when he was inaugurated. McCain would be 71. (Which might help you understand why Joe Lieberman was so eager to get that endorsement in and hope he'll get the VP slot)
But more to the point, why were only 2 Senators were elected President in the last 100 years?
They have a voting record and thousands of hours of debate and committee transcripts that make them way to easy to defeat in a general election. Hillary and Obama will have the same problems, but here's three problems that McCain has that are tops on my list:
- McCain-Feingold - The biggest anti-1st amendment law ever. It made money's influence in politics worse, not better.
- McCain-Kennedy - The worst piece of immigration reform, ever. It would make the country's illegal immigrations problems worse, not better.
- The Keating 5 Scandal - McCain abused his power as an Arizona Senator to help a corrupt supporter from California.
He was criticized by the Senate Ethics Committee in that scandal. That committee is a lot of foxes watching the hen house, so their criticism need to be taken in context. In a court of law in the real world for someone who's not a DC insider, that kind of corruption could land you in jail. If the Senate was serious about policing ethics violations, they would have expelled him.
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