U.S. Sen. John McCain knows why he wants to be president.

He isn't running for the job - officially. That won't happen, if it happens at all, until after next year's midterm elections.

McCain, who turns 69 on Monday, said "there's no point" in formally announcing his candidacy until after the 2006 congressional elections.

But the Arizona Republican didn't skip a beat Tuesday when asked why he would want to run for the White House in 2008.

"Because we live in a time of great challenges," McCain said in an interview with Arizona Daily Star editors and reporters.

Chief among them is the war on terror, a "transcendent issue" likely to last for years, he said. But there is "a broad variety of domestic challenges" as well.

Sounding much like a candidate ticking off the priorities of his platform, McCain said they include immigration, Social Security, global warming, rising health-care costs and the "obscene" spending practices of Washington.

"My ego is sufficient to say that I think I have the background and experience to take on these challenges," he said.

Asked about possible opposition to his candidacy from conservatives, McCain cited polls that show he and ex-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani are "the two most popular" members of the Republican Party.

That, he indicated, is a crucial factor in deciding whether he'll seek the presidency.

"As long as I have strong approval and support from most of the Republican Party, then running is a viable option," he said.

A recent poll by the Gallup Organization found that McCain's favorable ratings have consistently hovered above 50 percent since 2002, two years after he ran for the Republican nomination for president against George W. Bush.

But while the four-term senator is thought of highly across party and ideological lines, Gallup found a potential weak spot among conservatives - a key constituency to prevailing in Republican primaries.

The problem McCain could face with conservatives became evident earlier this month when the Arizona Republican Assembly, a conservative Mesa-based group, voted to censure him for what it called "dereliction of his duties and responsibilities as a representative of the citizens of Arizona."

The group unanimously passed a resolution critical of, among other things, the guest-worker legislation he's sponsoring with the man they called "his Democrat soulmate, Senator Ted Kennedy."

McCain didn't comment on the resolution but vowed to continue speaking his mind.

As the Gallup Poll noted, McCain has a generally consistent conservative voting record but forged a national reputation after a series of notable breaks with fellow Republicans.

On Tuesday, though, he sided with the president on two issues that have made headlines recently: teaching intelligent design in schools and Cindy Sheehan, the grieving mother who has come to personify the anti-war movement.

McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.

The theory of intelligent design says life is too complex to have developed through evolution, and that a higher power must have had a hand in guiding it.

At a breakfast meeting Tuesday with the Tucson Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, McCain said Sheehan is probably being used by organizations opposed to the U.S. mission in Iraq. But, he added, she is "a symptom, not a cause" of growing public discontent with the war.

Contact reporter C.J. Karamargin at 573-4243 or ckaramargin@azstarnet.com.

Commentary:
This is from the group that couldn't figure out Bush was lying to them. Do we want another president who simply follows the polls and panders to has base without regard to the damage caused to the US?

McCain's been in politics a long time and clearly Rove is setting up democrats in the next election. Can dems fight the idiocy of the right wing? Will the media let them? Dems need to get out in front on this issue can call it was it is--pseudo science--manufactured by right wing extremists who manufactured WMD so they could go to war and surpluses so they could bankrupt us with tax cuts.

The ordinal title of this article is "McCain sounds like presidential hopeful." By this they mean, a republican has to take leave of his senses as he runs to the right to get the base (yes folks, the republican base is that dumb).