|
|
Home>>>Opinion
|
Personal Thought: US Poll: McCain
as Republican candidate |
| Even as the Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are waging a tough battle for Democratic nomination, John McCain, a US senator from Arizona, has already clinched the Republican nomination and looks ahead to the November election. Clinton, 60, swept critical showdowns with Obama in Ohio and Texas on 04 March to keep her Democratic presidential bid alive. The victories for Clinton, a New York senator, snapped Obama's winning streak at 12 and defied widespread predictions that defeats in Ohio and Texas would force her out of the White House race. The hard-fought Democratic presidential duel moves on to contests in Wyoming and Mississippi and the next major showdown in Pennsylvania on April 22, with Clinton still trailing Obama in the pledged delegates who will choose the nominee at the August convention. Under Democratic rules allowing the losers in each state to win a proportional amount of delegates, Clinton must win many of the remaining contests by big margins to close the delegate gap behind Obama.
John McCain secured the Republican presidential nomination as the ultimate survivor -- winning it eight years after his first failed attempt and decades after cheating death in the Vietnam War. Easy to laugh and easy to anger, McCain carries with him the scars of battle in both armed conflict as a naval pilot and in the political wars of Washington as a U.S. senator from Arizona.
The 71-year-old McCain would be the oldest American ever elected to a first presidential term if he is able to defeat the Democrats' choice in the November election. He is also a cancer survivor, having undergone surgery for two malignant melanomas in 2000. President George W. Bush has endorsed the Arizona senator at the White House on Wednesday, capping McCain's comeback from the political scrap heap last year when his campaign was down in the polls and counted out. McCain's four big victories in Vermont, Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island drove his last major rival, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, out of the race and gave McCain more than the 1,191 delegates needed to win the nomination. President Bush's endorsement, it is said, could be risky for McCain, but since he is an ardant supporter of Bush that does not matter to him.
Born into a military family, McCain prides himself on not having been the greatest student to ever walk the halls of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. He graduated in 1958 and entered the Navy. By 1967, McCain was a veteran pilot aboard the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier off the coast of Vietnam. He was preparing to take off on a bombing run over North Vietnam when disaster struck.
Dr Abdul Ruff Colachal
|
|
 Print This Page  Mail This Story |
|
|
Terms
and Conditions