Word: arounders
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That he survived at all gave the country reason to consecrate him. But McCain, a rascal midshipman who graduated near the bottom of his class, had found his faith in a different standard, where glory is measured by commitment to causes larger than oneself. And if everyone around him was saying he had brought honor to his family name, he didn't yet have reason to believe it. "They are treating us like heroes," he told his Naval Academy roommate Chuck Larson when he got back to the States, "and all I did was get shot down...
...hard to see that as the main lesson, given how careless he still is about appearances. He denounces big-spending special interests and yet accepts flights on corporate jets; he puts the speaker of the Arizona house of representatives on his campaign payroll despite a flurry of ethics charges around him; he neglects to recuse himself from debates about measures that would affect his family beer business...
That's the film version, anyway. You could also argue that McCain spun around and embraced reform as a desperate bid to win back his strength and standing. But a funny thing happened on the way to his deathbed conversion: he really converted. By 1994 he was calling Democrat Russ Feingold, arguably the least powerful man in the Senate, and proposing that they join forces to reinvent the whole way money worked in politics. No pac money. Free TV. No soft money. It was a crusade that was guaranteed to lose friends and alienate people, especially the ones he would...
When he had patiently heard every last World War II remembrance and prescription-drug horror story, he boarded his bus, the Straight Talk Express, and reporters crowded around him like ants invited to a picnic. In most campaigns, a reporter has to grovel, scream or fake a nervous breakdown to get some chat time with a candidate. But all access, all the time has been McCain's way for years. Three senior campaign officials were squished against the bathroom door of his bus last week to leave seats open for print and TV crews...
...Look at the way he took the microphone and was walking around the stage like that. He enjoyed the hell out of this audience, and he was speaking with us, not to us," said Democrat Jack Hayes, 69, after McCain spoke at a jam-packed Phillips Exeter Academy on Wednesday night. "I mean, he gives you himself! And I love the way he's taking on his own party on campaign finance. What a gutsy call that...