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McCain announces bid

Influential Republican Senator John McCain announced on Wednesday he will run for the White House in next year's race.

"I am announcing that I will be a candidate for president of the United States," McCain said on CBS television's Late Show with David Letterman.

The Arizona senator, who lost his party's nomination in 2000 to now-President George W. Bush, said he would make a formal announcement in April.

But his long-expected entry into the race sees him running well behind former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, his main competition for the Republican nomination, according to polls.

Regarded as a straight-shooter and something of a Republican maverick, McCain, 70, set Washington abuzz with a speech just following Congressional elections last November, which saw Republicans perform badly on voter unhappiness with the war in Iraq.

"Without additional forces, we cannot win this war," McCain said, taking a strikingly unpopular position in the election's wake.

Also in November McCain, who was a prisoner of war in the Vietnam conflict, used a congressional hearing to dress down General John Abizaid, the top US commander in the Middle East.

"I regret deeply that you seem to think the status quo and the rate of progress we're making is acceptable. I think most Americans do not," McCain said.

As Democrats demand a phased withdrawal of US troops, McCain has argued that more men must be poured in to flush out insurgent strongholds, crush militias and sectarian violence and to train Iraqi forces -- a position since taken up by Bush.

McCain's many maverick stands also include challenges to his own party over corporate financing and to the White House over torture.

But a new poll on Wednesday showed him lagging in the Republican race behind Giuliani, known as "America's Mayor" for his handling of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on New York. Giuliani was pulling in 44 percent of support, compared to 34 percent on Jan. 19, according to the ABC News/Washington Post poll.

McCain, his top rival, lost six points, going from 27 percent last month to 21 percent in the new poll.

Former legislator Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 1994, gained six points, getting 15 percent of support compared to 9 percent a month ago.

On the Democratic side, meanwhile, Senator Hillary Clinton lost some ground the same survey showed.

But also showing strength was former vice president Al Gore, who got a boost following his winning an Academy Award on Sunday for his documentary on climate change An Inconvenient Truth.

Clinton, the former first lady, was favored by 36 percent of Democrats compared to 41 percent in an earlier survey. Her main rival in the 2008 Democratic race, Senator Barack Obama, enjoyed a surge in support with 24 percent in the latest poll compared to 17 percent in a Jan. 19 survey.

The poll numbers of another Democratic frontrunner, 2004 vice presidential candidate John Edwards, remained stable at 12 percent, just one point higher than a month ago.

But surging ahead of Edwards on his Oscar win was Gore, who though still denying any intent to contest the 2008 race moved into third place on the Democratic side with 14 percent support, up from 10 percent. Gore was defeated in the 2000 presidential race by Bush despite winning the overall popular vote.

The survey was conducted between Feb. 22 and Feb. 25, among 1,082 Americans. It has a plus-minus 3 percentage-point margin of error.

The first primaries to decide each party's nominees begin in early next year.

Regarded as a straight-shooter and something of a maverick at times in his party, McCain, 70, set Washington abuzz with a speech to a Republican political action committee in November, just over a week after the elections and on the day he took the first formal steps toward launching a presidential campaign.
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