I am uncomfortable with Sarah Palin. I have nothing against her. I'll say she's a very talented woman. Yet I think she owes John McCain her gratitude and loyalty.
Ana Navarro
From its skillful editing to its out-of-control budget and its relentless marketing, Mr. Obama's team played a different game at a different level than Sen. John McCain and his traditionalist staff.
Andrew Breitbart
In September 2008 - as Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy and AIG, the world's biggest insurance company, accepted a federal bailout - Senator John McCain of Arizona, in what was widely viewed as a political move, suspended his presidential campaign and called on Obama to rush back to Washington for a bipartisan meeting at the White House.
Andrew Ross Sorkin
If there was one senator who could truly empathize with being tortured in prison, it was John McCain.
Bill Browder
In 2008 all the stars aligned perfectly for Obama's 6-point victory over John McCain. He was an inexperienced, untested neophyte, and successfully convinced enough voters to paint their own version of what hope-and-change was all about on the blank canvas he provided.
Bob Beauprez
Among the events of John McCain's five-and-a-half years of imprisonment and torture in North Vietnam, probably the most heroic, and surely the most celebrated, was his refusal to accept an early release from his captors.
Bret Stephens
I don't know a single Republican in Montana who would get in a fight in a bowling alley for John McCain.
Brian Schweitzer
Experience is a legitimate issue when John McCain raises it about Obama, and it's also legitimate for us to raise it about Palin.
Campbell Brown
I think of John McCain as a conservative, but he is clearly not the same kind of 'conservative' as, say, Rand Paul. The word is close to losing almost all meaning.
Charlie Sykes
The GOP was once the party of William F. Buckley Jr., Ronald Reagan, and John McCain.
In 2013 and 2014, I traveled to Ukraine three times with Senator John McCain.
Chris Murphy
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him.
Christopher Buckley
Really, what's not to love in John McCain, satire-wise? As if he had not already been good enough to us, then came his nomination of Sarah Palin. Here, truly, was a gift from the gods of satire.
Economic conservatives like immigration reform, and in fact, many of them supported the bill that John McCain and I put together in the Senate.
Chuck Schumer
With the likely nominations of Barack Obama by the Democrats and John McCain by the Republicans, one of these two parties is headed for a 2009 crack-up that could prove as messy as any party civil war in recent history.
Chuck Todd
My wife used to be an anchorwoman in Arizona, so she knew John McCain, and she liked him, and I kinda liked him.
Clint Eastwood
I thought that Donald Trump's ascendancy would end when he attacked John McCain, saying he's not a war hero. I found that shocking, for him to say that.
Cory Booker
When I was first assigned to cover the Republican presidential race in 2007, that meant covering John McCain. He was the next in line, and at that point that mattered in the GOP.
Dana Bash
The John McCain I first started to get to know in earnest was the one who had just returned to the U.S. Senate after losing the 2000 Republican presidential primary.
Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign, his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and, thus, his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.
David Limbaugh
Palin was a political Hail Mary, a long bomb in the closing minutes of a game that John McCain and Co. were certain to lose. They didn't care if she had the policy or political or emotional capacity to serve as vice president, let alone president. They were willing to drive the country off a cliff, if that's what it took to win.
'Not again!' I thought to myself this morning, as news trickled out that John McCain was set to pick Alaska governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Not again, because too often women are promoted for the wrong reasons, and then blamed when things don't go right.
Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.
If both John McCain and Obama were given a sip of truth serum, both would admit they made serious mistakes in choosing running mates in 2008.
The Republican Party, which John McCain led as our nominee in 2008, is going to become irrelevant if we become the party of intolerance and hate. The party founded by Abraham Lincoln was a party that fought slavery and intolerance at every level.
John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as running mate is the towering example of his poor judgment. Palin's ignorance of public affairs is monumental.
I'd vote for Mickey Mouse before I voted for John McCain and Sarah Palin.
As an American Jew who loves Israel, I cannot support John McCain. He cannot provide what Israel needs most - a respected, credible, morally strong America.
If George W. Bush is the kind of person folks might like to have a beer with, John McCain is the guy you pray you don't get seated next to at a dinner party.
Trump has never sacrificed anything for this country, and in fact, he has attacked people who have. It just makes me sick to my stomach when I see him attacking the mother of a fallen hero or John McCain. It just makes me sick to my stomach that this guy thinks he's prepared to be commander-in-chief.
I used to like John McCain, too, but I must admit that was because he was bucking his party to do things I agreed with. I would not have had that reaction if, say, Bernie Sanders decided to rebel out of principle and support privatizing Social Security.
I can't stand John McCain.
There's Lindsey Graham 1.0 and then there's Lindsey Graham 2.0. I could not beat Lindsey Graham 1.0. That was the John McCain-Lindsey Graham.
In 2008, Barack Obama did get Democrats hyperventilating, whipped up to a creamy froth, while John McCain creaked ahead like a cranky granddad whom Republicans let move to the front of the buffet line, deferring to seniority, as they had in 1996, when Bob Dole turtled to the top of the ticket.
To bolster his right flank and attract women voters, John McCain had cynically opted for a running mate who was, by any stretch of the imagination, unqualified for a position a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Remember, the first presidential candidate to reject public financing for both the primary and general election was... Barack Obama, in 2008. He did it, in spite of a flat pledge to the contrary, because his campaign saw that it could vastly outspend John McCain.
A lot of people didn't like John McCain.
In 2008, Senator John McCain forbid his staff from using an ad that referred to his opponent Barack Obama's inflammatory former pastor Jeremiah Wright or from raising that issue in any other way. He believed it was a sneaky way to use Obama's race against him.
When the news broke that John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, the outpouring of well wishes all hailed his toughness.
When I interviewed John McCain in 2000 about whether he had taken medication for his anger, I remember thinking, 'Let's see how this is going to work.'
I think it's important for Donald Trump to express his appreciation for veterans - not John McCain, but veterans who were incarcerated as prisoners of war.
I like John McCain, or he seems like a cool guy in a lot of ways. I don't agree with a lot of his policies, but he still seems like a cool guy.
The campaigns of Steve Forbes, Pat Buchanan, Ross Perot, and John McCain all outperformed expectations on their support from independent voters. They made no effort to shy away from ideology, but conveyed to voters that their policies were driven by principle, not party talking points.
In 2008, Obama won 56 percent of the women's vote to John McCain's 43 percent. It was the critical difference in the race.
Romney, like Sen. John McCain and Bob Dole before him, were meant to mollify moderates, attract Independents, and 'rebrand' the party in a way that mostly fits the ideal of media types who would never vote Republican anyhow. Each of them lost.
Very few people know anybody like John McCain, someone who suffered and had his body, yet not his spirit, broken for six years as a POW and who has served his nation.
John McCain was one of the senators who voted against George Herbert Walker Bush's disastrous break of his no new taxes pledge when he raised taxes in 1990. That's really important. He's a supply-sider. And he's got supply siders like Phil Graham and Jack Kemp to vouch for that.
For a while under Donald Trump, it was possible to believe that we could go back to a more functional, less rancorous time. This desire was expressed most eloquently at John McCain's funeral services.
Perhaps the right to authenticity and the reverence of authenticity should be reserved for people like John McCain. John McCain who at his most authentic chose to stay and face years of torture rather than leave before his brothers.
The fact that this is what John McCain is suggesting - more offshore drilling and more nuclear power plants? I don't think so. Not even close. Not even in the ballpark of what we need.
