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Aides to John McCain initially added Sarah Palin to his "short list" of potential running mates because McCain wanted a woman on the list, according to his campaign manager. McCain entered the vice presidential selection process with a list of five possibilities: Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney, Michael Bloomberg, Charlie Crist, and Joe Lieberman, according to Washingtonian's profile (which isn't online) of Washington lawyer A.B. Culvahouse, who led the search. "As the clock was running out, [campaign manager Rick] Davis say McCain asked to have at least one woman on the short list. His advisers went back to the long list...

(snip) Dig long enough and just about every Republican has a green skeleton in their closet. Many of them have their last presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, a longtime cap-and-trade enthusiast, to thank for it. (snip) "I support a reasonable cap-and-trade system," [Pawlenty] said. "I think it'd be good for the federal government to take that up rather than have states take it up as clusters of regions." Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, appealed to a New Hampshire audience in October 2007 on moral grounds by saying he backed a cap-and-trade system to reduce greenhouse gases and faulted the...

In a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey, 49 per cent of Republicans said that they were "very" or "somewhat likely" to support a run by Mrs Palin, who shot to international prominence in 2008 when she was selected as Senator John McCain's vice-presidential running mate. This is down sharply from the 67 per cent of Republicans who said that they were likely to support a Palin candidacy in 2012 when they were asked in a CNN poll in December 2008. Of her main potential rivals, two thirds of Republicans questioned stated that they were somewhat or very likely to support...

Insiders say President George W. Bush thinks Sarah Palin is not qualified to be the president, according to a NY Daily News report. The paper says Bush also criticized Sen. John McCain for putting her the 2008 Republican ticket. It doesn't identify any of the Bush friends and sources by name and it quotes one unnamed Republican official who says that McCain's Palin decision made "Bush think less of McCain as a man."

Long-simmering tensions within the Republican Party spilled into public view Wednesday as the pragmatic and conservative wings of the GOP blamed each other in blunt terms for the party’s failure to capture the Senate. With tea party-backed candidates going down in Delaware, Colorado and Nevada, depriving Republicans of what would have been a 50-50 Senate, a bloc of prominent senators and operatives said party purists like Sarah Palin and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) had foolishly pushed nominees too conservative to win in politically competitive states. (snip) Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott put it plainly: “We did not nominate our...

"Down one road is extremism -- where Roe v. Wade is overturned and being a moderate is a curse" says Charlie Crist in his new ad. "That's the road Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and Marco Rubio want to take us down."

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sen. John McCain is calling Sarah Palin an "outstanding candidate" for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, but says it's too early to endorse her.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. John McCain says he shares Sarah Palin's opinion that Republican congressional candidates could suffer at the polls if they stray from the tea party's anti-spending, anti-tax message. (snip) The Arizona Republican said that when Republicans gained majorities in Congress in 1994, "they betrayed our base, particularly in the area of fiscal responsibility" and were repudiated in the next two elections. McCain said, "What Sarah is saying is, 'We've got to get fiscally responsible Republicans in.' "

In the midst of one of the most precipitous political crashes in the Mountain West, Sarah Palin made a mad dash into Boise on Friday, urging the election of a man who had plagiarized his campaign speech from Barack Obama, had been rebuked by the military for misusing the Marine uniform and had called the American territory of Puerto Rico a separate country. And why not? Vaughn Ward, the Republican congressional candidate from Idaho, has the dubious character trifecta of the Palin brand: bone-headed, defiant and willfully ignorant. When told that Puerto Rico was not a country, he said, “I...

National Democrats have asked the Federal Election Commission to investigate whether Arizona Sen. John McCain violated campaign finance laws when his campaign paid to run ads for Republican House candidates in Arizona — charges the McCain campaign said are “baseless.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee filed a FEC complaint Tuesday against McCain and his campaign committee, Friends of John McCain, because of recent ads backing Ruth McClung, the GOP nominee in Arizona’s 7th District, and Jesse Kelly, who is running in the 8th District. The complaint also asks the FEC to investigate whether McClung, Kelly and their respective campaign committees...

(snip) ...as McCain again said he supported his former running mate former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin. "I haven't seen anyone since Ronald Reagan that with certain individuals and large groups of individuals who really have this passionate belief and support for her," he said, "It's really a remarkable thing to observe." (snip) "I couldn't be more proud of the campaign she waged," he said. "I couldn't be more proud of her or her performance and her continued performance. So, I think, you begin to think about legacy and I think that Sarah Palin will play a very big role in...

South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said Sunday that Sarah Palin is considering a run for president in 2012. "She's obviously toying with the idea," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

The Hill runs a report crediting Sarah Palin for her many Republic primary victories. Before conservatives take too much pleasure in such news, read how she is credited with helping sweep John McCain to victory. Palin traveled to Arizona and made numerous campaign appearances with McCain, bringing him the Tea Party creds he so desperately needed to undercut the fact that he is a nearly three-decades-long, left-leaning Washington insider. That Palin chose to conveniently back McCain over conservative former U.S. Rep. J.D. Hayworth is a truth that should not soon be forgotten. Her help, McCain’s falsely running to the right,...

To understand why Democrats ever picked Mondale, you have to understand where the party — and where the country — was in 1982 and 1983, when the nation’s verdict on Reagan and his policies was far less positive. In those days, with unemployment surging over 10 percent and the president’s popularity slipping to sub-Carter levels, Democrats mistakenly assumed that the ‘80 election had been a mirage. The electorate, they figured, had acted in haste and was rapidly returning to its senses. The results of the 1982 midterms, when Republicans (who had begun the cycle with claims that they’d win...