One and done?

So some surrogates for John McCain are floating the idea that he may take a one-term-only pledge.

Rick Davis, appearing on "Fox News Sunday," demurred three times when Chris Wallace raised the prospect that McCain may use the Republican convention next month to make such a promise.

Wallace raised the prospect -- much discussed in political circles -- that McCain could combine the one-term pledge with a vow that he would run an apolitical administration.

"If you know John McCain, you know there's not going to be much politics in the White House," Davis replied, ignoring the matter of whether the Arizona senator, who turns 72 later this month, could limit himself to a single term.

Asked directly about the matter, Davis replied: "Chris, you're going to have to come to the Republican convention."

Putting the "apolitical administration" nonsense aside, I confess I don't see the appeal of this. While there are some folks who think it would gain him a lot of positive press, I have to agree with Isaac Chotiner's suggestion that the focus will be on McCain's age, which won't help him at all. Plus, as even McCain himself has noted, that would make him lame duck on Day One, and given the certainty of sizeable Democratic majorities in both chambers of Congress for at least the first half of that term, how would he hope to get anything accomplished? And finally, this would raise the stakes in his search for a Vice President, since that person would surely become the nominee in 2012. What do you think?

Of course, just because McCain would make such a pledge, it doesn't follow that he'd necessarily stick to it. The streets are littered with (mostly Republican) politicians who entered office having made pledges to voluntarily limit their terms, only to decide later that they're just too indispensible to step down when their self-imposed time was supposed to be up. Like Kay Bailey Hutchison, for example. Hey, maybe that's a sign she's still in the running to be his VP: She has prior experience with this sort of thing. VP selections have been made for sillier reasons than that, after all.

Posted by Charles Kuffner on August 14, 2008 to The making of the President