MCCAIN TO GOP: LESS IS MORE

    Sen. John McCain stirred the 2008 political pot yesterday by creating a presidential exploratory committee and calling on fellow Republicans to return to the principles of "commonsense conservatism" that powered them to past victories.

    "We lost our principles and our majority. And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first," McCain said in a speech to the Federalist Society, a conservative legal group.

    He said voters swept out the Republicans from the leadership of both houses of Congress because the party went away from its principal vision of less government.