Recently, John McCain has been squiring an attractive brunette Republican around town, a rising political star and young mother. The two have appeared together in high-profile press conferences. She has talked a great deal about parts of the world she can’t see from her iconoclastic home state, which is where all of her political experience was located until very recently. He’s given glowing interviews about her potential for future leadership, and gone out of his way to put his decades of experience and his reputation on the line for her. “She really is a rising star in the Republican Party,” McCain said of her once. “I can see her being very seriously considered for both vice president, and certainly over time, for the presidential nomination.”

No, you have not time-traveled back to 2008. The woman in question is Kelly Ayotte, the 44-year-old New Hampshire senator elected in 2010, who has lately raised eyebrows for her sudden elevation into one of the most high-profile congressional alliances. Thanks to the upcoming retirement of Joe Lieberman, there’s an opening in the so-called Three Amigos, the (formerly) bipartisan group of self-styled foreign-policy truth-tellers. McCain, along with South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, has adopted Ayotte just in time for their loudest campaign in recent memory, against the nomination of Susan Rice for Secretary of State because of her role in the Benghazi affair. Ayotte, in a foot-stamping move, has personally pledged to block ANY Clinton successor who doesn’t make her happy.

Ayotte represents not just a do-over for McCain in the mentoring department, but for the Republican Party as well. She is indeed a “senorita” for the amigos, in a post-election landscape in which the GOP has come to realize that it might need to redouble its efforts to build a coalition that includes more women and minorities.