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McCain Denies Interest in 2004 Kerry Ticket
Sen. John McCain’s aides have denied Sen. John Kerry’s claim that McCain approached him about running as his vice presidential candidate in 2004. During an interview in Portland, Ore., on Monday, Jonathan Singer of the liberal blog MyDD.com asked Kerry about a recent published report – since denied by the McCain camp – that the Arizona Republican had considered leaving the GOP in 2001. "It doesn’t surprise me completely, because his people similarly approached me to engage in a discussion about his potentially being on the ticket as vice president,” Kerry said. "So his people were active – let’s put it that way.” But Mark Salter, who was McCain’s Senate chief of staff in 2004 and is now senior adviser to his presidential campaign, said it was the other way around – Kerry approached McCain about joining the ticket.
Story Continues Below "Each conversation, McCain would say, "no, John, no,’ and raise objections,” Salter told The Politico. "Then Kerry would say, ‘Would you just please do me a favor? Will you listen to my pitch if I come back to you with another idea?’ And then Kerry would come back with preposterous ideas, essentially turning over the national security part of the presidency to McCain . . . "McCain approached nobody.”
According to Salter, McCain told Kerry: "I’m a Republican, you’re a Democrat. There are reasons we can’t do this.”
McCain’s longtime chief political strategist John Weaver also denied that McCain had approached Kerry about the vice presidential slot. Kerry asked McCain "to consider being his running mate and announcing it in the primaries,” Weaver told The Politico. "John laughed it off and told him, ‘No.’ Weaver said Kerry "had fallen in love with a concept that was so impossible to consider that it’s hard to imagine how someone could have come up with it.”
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2004 Elections Inside Cover Stories
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