What if mccain had won

As he stumped at Gonzaga University, Seattle and Bremerton in February that year, he described a plan of reaching out to independents and moderates, getting enough votes in both the GOP and independent ballots the state was issuing that year to prove he was a better option for November than George W.

Even if he narrowly lost the GOP primary, but had more votes overall when the independent ballots were counted, he suggested he could notch a win and gain momentum. As it turned out, Bush beat McCain by more than 90, votes in the GOP primary and got the handful of delegates that came with them. While McCain did about 90, votes better in the independent tally, Bush finished about 2, votes ahead overall and those independent votes were quickly forgotten.

Two weeks later, McCain dropped out. But what if that quixotic, mad dash across the state — a flight from Spokane to Boeing Field, a bus ride up I-5 to a downtown speech, then a ferry ride across the Sound with former Vietnam vets and POWs — had worked, giving McCain the momentum to keep winning and eventually capture the Republican nomination? He would eventually relent and sign a "confession" he had committed war crimes.

He never sought or received special treatment because of his parentage, however, and when he left Vietnam he did so with his fellow prisoners. McCain made his entry into politics by winning an open seat in a reliably Republican Phoenix-area US congressional district. He had moved to Arizona shortly after marrying his second wife, Cindy, and spent some time working for her father, a wealthy Phoenix businessman, where he made the kind of influential connections that would help support his congressional bid.

He wasn't going to get the assignments that he would need to make admiral, so remaining as a captain until retirement was not in his interests. The highlight of his first campaign was a Republican primary debate, when one of his opponents questioned McCain's ties to his newly adopted home state. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world.

I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.

He would win more than double the votes of his Democratic opponent in the November general election. In his memoir, McCain said that he thought his debate performance won the election - although it wasn't part of a grand campaign strategy. McCain arrived as a freshman congressman in Washington with strong connections already in place.

Prior to leaving the armed forces, he had served as Navy liaison to Congress and had forged ties with politicians and staffers in the Capitol. It was the same position McCain's father held when McCain was a teenager. But McCain "was always different," says biographer Elizabeth Drew.

While his record in the House was fairly conventional, "he was never just one of the boys," Drew says. McCain was elected president of his congressional class. On one of his first high-profile votes, he broke with his party and president, Ronald Reagan, in opposing a US military deployment to Lebanon - a position that would be vindicated just a month later, when US Marines and 58 French soldiers were killed in a suicide attack on their military compound.

In his second term, he landed a plum position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee. In he would return to Vietnam with legendary CBS television presenter Walter Cronkite, where he posed for photographs by a monument to the anti-aircraft battery that shot down his plane.

A US political magazine labelled him a "Republican on the rise". A year later, he would run for, and win, a seat in the US Senate from Arizona. He replaced Barry Goldwater, the godfather of the US conservative movement and the Republican presidential nominee in It was an office he held for the remaining 31 years of his life. One of the realities of American politics is that candidates and officeholders have to engage in a nearly endless effort to raise the funds necessary to run for office and win re-election.

It was a lesson McCain learned as he was courting Phoenix-area businessmen and wealthy donors prior to his first run for Congress. And it was one of those businessmen, banker and real-estate developer Charles Keating, who nearly destroyed McCain's political career. The scandal that engulfed him grew out of the savings and loan crisis of the late s, when a combination of lax financial regulation and business corruption led to the collapse of more than a thousand financial institutions.

Keating feared his firm, Lincoln Savings and Loan, was being targeted for increased scrutiny from government regulators and in danger of failing. He urged his friends in the US Senate - men whose campaigns he had supported - to convince federal officials to go easy on Lincoln. One of those men was McCain, who in addition to taking campaign contributions from Keating, had gone on several vacations to the Bahamas courtesy of the businessman.

McCain sat in on two meetings between senators and regulators to review the matter. The five senators, simply by their presence, showed regulators that Keating had powerful friends. McCain said he only wanted to make sure Lincoln was being treated fairly. In the second gathering, McCain learned that Lincoln was being referred to the justice department for criminal prosecution. At that point, the Arizona senator dropped the matter - but he had held his hand close to the flame.

It wasn't long before the whole matter went public, and McCain felt the heat. The former Connecticut senator also expressed satisfaction with the fact that, even though McCain was dissuaded by powerful Republican leaders from choosing Lieberman as his running mate, prejudice against Jews played absolutely no role in their thinking.

As we recall this great "What if? After all, if McCain had chosen Lieberman as his running mate in , it could have potentially vindicated the fact that Lieberman had won the most votes to be vice president eight years earlier but was denied the office after a controversial legal battle.

Or, conversely, it could have earned Lieberman the distinction of being the first vice presidential candidate to lose on the ticket of both major parties. There are many writers who dislike historical counterfactuals, but I am not one of them. By analyzing how the course of American history might have been altered through the actions of a single man, it reminds us of the degree to which a single individual can make a monumental difference if he or she simply makes the correct bold choice at the right time.

With the possibility of a McCain-Lieberman ticket specifically, it also reminds us that it wasn't so long ago — merely a decade, in fact — that a Republican presidential candidate was trying to bring Americans from both parties together rather than capitalizing on their divisions. This is a tribute to the legacies of both McCain and Lieberman, as well as to the way that the fabric of history can be woven or unraveled by individual initiatives.

Matthew Rozsa is a staff writer for Salon. Sticky Header Night Mode. Senator Joe Lieberman on the decline of bipartisanship Lieberman on America's two parties working together.

What about Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Arab Spring? And what about the scandals "phony," according to Democrats that have dragged down Obama in the polls? A quick look:. With the economy in freefall in , McCain issued a plan calling for, among other things, a cut in the corporate tax rate, allowing faster deductions of business equipment and technology to spur investment, and tax credits for research and development.

Sounds great. But these are all things that Obama has been proposing for years. He has been continually stymied by Republican obstructionism. No difference there. In McCain called for a stimulus bill "that would directly help people, create jobs, and provide a jolt to our economy. Economists today acknowledge that the stimulus produced about 2.

It didn't keep unemployment below 8 percent as Obama promised, but the economy was a hell of a lot worse than anyone thought at the time.

The bottom line? President McCain would probably have pushed the same sort of stimulus and economic measures that President Obama has pushed — and struggled with similarly frustrating results. One big difference: McCain opposed the auto bailouts of and Even if had been in the White House, would he have denied Detroit's automakers the funds that have helped the U.