McCain rallies Republican die-hards as Romney quits

WASHINGTON (AFP) - Senator John McCain fought for the backing of the Republican Party's conservative base in a fiery speech Thursday just after rival Mitt Romney quit the race, clearing his path to the White House.

Addressing the annual gathering of fervent Republican activists, McCain sought to shore up his conservative credentials and allay fears over his stand on some key issues as he seeks the party's presidential nomination.

"It is my sincere hope that even if you believe I have occasionally erred in my reasoning as a fellow conservative, you will still allow that I have, in many ways important to all of us, maintained the record of a conservative."

With former Massachusetts governor Romney dropping out of the race on Thursday after a slew of poor Super Tuesday showings, McCain's path to the Republican ticket is suddenly a lot clearer.

But recognizing the crucial support he needs from the party's conservative base to win the nomination for the November elections, the Vietnam war veteran called for its backing in defeating the Democrats.

"I am acutely aware that I cannot succeed in that endeavor, nor can our party prevail over the challenge we will face ... without the support of dedicated conservatives."

Peppering his speech with references to former president and Republican icon Ronald Reagan, McCain set out a platform of tough stands on various issues from abortion, to tax cuts and his unwavering support for the Iraq war.

The Arizona senator, 71, has a solid conservative voting record, but has enraged the key constituency with his stands on immigration reform, by initially opposing Bush's huge tax cuts and on campaign finance measures.

But addressing the immigration issue head-on, McCain told the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that he had "stood my ground aware that my position would imperil my campaign."

His intention had been to restore border controls, he said, vowing that as president he would work first to secure the frontiers before trying to tackle illegal immigration.

"I will not obscure my positions from voters who I fear might not share them. I will stand on my convictions, my conservative convictions and trust in the good sense of the voters," McCain said.

And he pledged to offer voters "a clearly conservative approach to governing," as the crowd warmed to his speech after an initially chilly welcome.

Romney earlier quit the White House race after spending millions of dollars of his personal fortune on a campaign which failed to fire up the party faithful.

"This isn't an easy decision, I hate to lose," Romney told the conservative conference, saying he was suspending his campaign to avoid a damaging, divisive race which could hand the November elections to the Democrats.

In the deadlocked Democratic race, Barack Obama has reaped a stunning seven million dollars since the Super Tuesday clash, amid news that Hillary Clinton faced a cash crunch forcing her to loan her campaign five million dollars.

The former first lady has brought in three million dollars in less than 24 hours since Super Tuesday and a new six million dollar target was set to be unveiled on Thursday.

Illinois Senator Obama however, who last month raised an incredible 32 million dollars, again outpaced her, raking in seven million dollars since polls closed on Tuesday.

The Democratic rivals are set for a clutch of smaller primary and caucus contests, before the next big showdowns on March 4 in Ohio and Texas.

If no clear winner emerges by then, eyes will turn to Pennsylvania's late April primary, with chances growing the tie may only be broken at the Democratic convention in August.

McCain won nine of 21 states on offer Tuesday, giving him 720 delegates to the Republican convention. Romney holds onto the 279 he has won so far, while Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee has 194. A total of 1,191 are needed to win the nomination.

Senator Clinton won eight states Tuesday, including the three biggest prizes -- California, her home state of New York and Massachusetts -- but Obama won 13.

A Real Clear Politics running count had the New York senator with 1,056 delegates, half of the 2,025 she needs to capture the nomination. Obama had 979.

Straight Talk About The Straight-Talker

John McCain. He is “a man of integrity without integrity”—meaning that the senator is reputed to have great integrity, but in fact has little, given the definition of that word: “the quality of possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles or professional standards” (Encarta DictionaryTwo different, but related, events that coalesced today are what have caused me to write on this subject.The first was an email from a friend observing that a noted Washington, D.C. conservative journalist just said to her that he “disagreed with what McCain was saying,” but nonetheless “considered McCain far and above the best [presidential] candidate” because “the man has integrity.”

The second was this week’s Newsweek Web Exclusive by Jonathan Alter, relating a telephone call he had just received from Ross Perot, the unsuccessful presidential candidate who has long been a major voice on behalf of POWs and MIAs. Alter quoted Perot as saying that McCain “is the classic opportunist—he’s always reaching for attention and glory. Other POWs won’t even sit at the same table with him.”

According to Alter, “Perot’s real problem with McCain is that he believes that the senator hushed up evidence that live POWs were left behind in Vietnam and even transferred to the Soviet Union for human experimentation, a charge Perot says he heard from a senior Vietnamese official in the 1980s. ‘There’s evidence, evidence, evidence,’ Perot claims. ‘McCain was adamant about shutting down anything to do with recovering POWs.’”
Perot was referring principally to McCain’s tag-team performance with John Kerry on a Senate committee charged with getting to the bottom of the MIA question. (See the article “Archangel 1918 to Hanoi 1972”)
That article series and the copious sources cited in it leave no doubt that McCain was instrumental in burying, sadly for all time, any possibility of learning what became of Americans who were missing in action throughout Southeast Asia. Hardly the work of a man of integrity, let alone a United States Senator and himself a former prisoner of war.
While McCain’s lack of integrity in the MIA investigation is so dramatic because of his own military and POW background, there are other examples which are equally important and disturbing.
The man of integrity and self-proclaimed fighter for the “little guy” was up to his ears in the infamous “Keating Five” bank scandal, which cost countless American bank depositors incalculable amounts of money and some of them their life savings.

The man of integrity, a Republican and alleged conservative, partnered with leftwing Democrat Senator Russ Feingold to sponsor and enact a federal statute that has throttled considerable free political speech in American election campaigns, because, according to McCain himself he “would rather have a clean government than one where quote First Amendment rights are being respected, that has become corrupt. If I had my choice, I’d rather have the clean government.”
The man of integrity did his best to legitimize millions of illegal aliens, despite their criminality, their harmful effect on the American economy, and its workers.
The man of integrity, during his two-plus decades in Congress, and his political heft there, did little or nothing on behalf of veterans, despite the fact that few in that body knew better than he the personal costs of their service and their needs.
The man of integrity, who supposedly opposes the “living Constitution” principle, organized the Senate cabal euphemistically known as the “Gang of Fourteen,” which made him kingmaker and indispensable to the White House in its nomination of Supreme Court justices and other federal judges—thereby, in a single coup, weakening the President’s appointment power and enabling the Senate to filibuster in violation of its constitutional duty to give judicial nominees up or down votes.
The man of integrity, a Navy pilot who spent over five years as a POW, whitewashed antiwar poster-girl Hanoi Jane Fonda, whom he characterized as merely a “confused young actress”—thereby insulting many of his POW brothers and others who suffered from her conduct, further legitimizing her traitorous behavior on behalf of the Communists.
The man of integrity, with a reputation for being strong on national security, engineered a near-unanimous Senate vote to give “enemy combatants” (i.e., Islamic terrorists) all the protections the Geneva Convention reserves for prisoners of war, and to prohibit the obtaining of crucially important intelligence by “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.”
The man of integrity, who rails against government waste and purports to believe in a strong economy, twice broke ranks with his party, and voted against the Bush tax cuts. And against repeal of the death tax.
The man of integrity, who so prides himself on being a maverick individualist, admits to being a collectivist by such statements as “Each and every one of us has a duty to serve a cause greater than our [own] self-interest.”
The man of integrity, claiming concern with America’s dependency on foreign oil and the wealth transfer that it causes, joined the left no fewer than four times in defeating our ability to drill in Alaska.
The man of integrity joined with socialist [hawk] Senator Joseph Lieberman to promote an energy tax to combat “global warming,” even though it would help the oil cartel— and, worse, be aimed at a spurious threat that lacks credible scientific basis.
Now McCain has become the potential Republican presidential nominee.
So the time has come to make an explicit issue of his purported integrity—an accolade deriving mostly from his reputation for “straight talk” (which has nothing per se to do with integrity), and his having been a prisoner of war.
Having been a POW—which McCain has recently been reminding voters about, especially in South Carolina—no more qualifies, let alone entitles, John McCain to be President of the United States than it does any other former POW.
Nor is it possible to extrapolate from McCain’s POW experience all of the qualities a conservative president must possess in these times of deadly threats from abroad and a semi-socialist domestic economy brought us by the Republicans—and inevitable under the Democrats.
Nor does having suffered the agonies of Communist captivity give John McCain, or anyone else, a license to act consistently in a manner inimical to the interests of the United States of America and its people. It does not elevate a political opportunist and a man who lacks integrity into a presidential candidate who possesses that quality. Suffering is not a substitute for “possessing and steadfastly adhering to high moral principles.”

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