McCain rejects Courtship

Last week, Arizona Republican, Senator John McCain, made clear on a late-night television show his lack of enthusiasm about signing up for being No. 2 to George Bush.

I spent several years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, in the dark, fed with scraps. Do you think I want to do that all over again as vice president of the United States?

Now, The New York Times brings word that Mr. McCain has also flatly refused to be the running mate of Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president. This brings an end to speculation about the potential of a bipartisan ticket, with the two friends and Vietnam veterans matching up against President Bush and Vice President Cheney, neither of whom fought in that war.

According to the report, Mr. Kerry first made direct overtures to Mr. McCain about three weeks after locking up the Democratic nomination in March and approached him again, in person or by telephone, as many as seven times, as recently as last week.

Detractors of the current Bush administration will be disappointed by this news as a Kerry-McCain ticket is generally expected to be unstoppable in the fall. Mr. McCain had showed in 2000 that he could draw Independent voters. A CBS News poll recently found that a Kerry-McCain ticket had a 14-percentage-point edge over Bush-Cheney among registered voters, 53 percent to 39 percent. Alone, Mr. Kerry was tied or slightly ahead of Mr. Bush.