Sen. Lindsey Graham suspends presidential campaign

Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican presidential candidate who always seemed to be having the most fun (when he wasn’t calling for World War III), announced on Monday that he would end his White House bid after his peculiar combination of barroom jocularity and extreme hawkishness failed to attract voters.

“Today I am suspending my campaign”, Graham says in the video, which includes implicit criticism of the Republican field that he is abandoning.

In a race crowded at one point with 17 candidates Graham was swamped by political outsiders including Trump retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson and to a degree his fellow Senator Ted Cruz. “I’ve hit a wall here”. “I am not going to suspend my desire to help my country”. And he supported the use of American ground troops in Iraq and Syria long before President Obama moved in that direction. At a time when too many running for their party’s nomination are willing to trim ideas to fit the latest focus group outcome, Graham insisted, “I am not going to give an inch on the [immigration] idea”. “However the centerpiece of my campaign has been securing our nation”, Graham said in his farewell video.

Liz Mair, a veteran GOP strategist who briefly worked on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s (R) campaign earlier this year, noted that Graham’s departure from the race frees up some state elected officials and activists to endorse another candidate. One of the reasons he got involved in the race, Graham said, was to “turn back the tide of isolationism rising in our party”.

Graham, a close friend of 2008 GOP nominee John McCain, is one of the most prominent foreign policy hawks in the Senate.

But Graham’s cleverness couldn’t even keep him at the top of the GOP polls in his own state, and nationally he was an asterisk, stuck at 0.5% in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. “I believe we’ve made enormous progress in this effort”, said Sen.

Gilmore also retweeted a follower saying he hoped Gilmore would be included in more presidential debates with Graham ending his campaign.

The withdrawal came on the last day Graham could remove his name from the South Carolina Republican primary ballot, sparing him possible embarrassment in his home state given his paltry standing in the polls.

During an interview on CNN, Graham reminded Trump that American troops are serving overseas under hard circumstances.