With all due respect Senator McCain…even considering that Arizona will probably send a far more conservative tea party adherent to Washington…it’s time to retire:
Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain is leaning toward running for a sixth term in 2016, he said Friday.
“I still think I have a lot to do,” he said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press. “I’m most likely going to run for re-election.”
Now chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain said Friday that he wants to continue serving past 2016, regardless of which party controls the chamber. McCain turns 80 that year.
McCain and his party have clashed over the past year, with the state Republican party censuring him for being insufficiently conservative on such issues as immigration and gun control. He’s been dogged by criticism over those issues and more since he first ran for Congress in 1982.
I have gone from respecting Senator McCain to being embarrassed by him…some of the things that he has said and done in the Senate since his defeat in the 2008 Presidential campaign are just flat out embarrassing.
I think given the growing number of House members who become senators, and the chance that the result will be a lowering of standards in the upper body with more brashness, that it becomes more important than ever to have older members with institutional memory and experience still in power to lead the body. McCain is not perfect–at times far from it. But it is the seasoned members who are strongly needed in times of crisis and tension to keep the nation moving forward and calm. Replacing McCain with someone like Ted Cruz would be simply horrible.