Word: campaign
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...politician's first campaign has a way of shaping him forever, then you can trace the patterns of his current New Hampshire ground war back to 1982 and the newly poured asphalt of Arizona's rapidly growing First District. Arizona may have been new to McCain, but he was not new to the state. In 1980 he had married Cindy Hensley, 18 years his junior and the daughter of one of the largest beer distributors in the country. "His history as a POW preceded him out here," she admits, "because my father was so proud of him." McCain went...
Cindy McCain remembers exactly how she heard the news. She was in the hospital, recovering from painful back surgery. "A resident came in and threw the newspaper on the bed," she recalls. The headlines revealed that McCain had received $112,000 in campaign contributions from Charles Keating, the sleazy S&L owner whose collapsed empire cost taxpayers more than $3 billion and wiped out the stockholdings of thousands of small investors. "I guess your husband is not such a great guy after all," the resident told...
...ruin even his image. But it's 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...
...from making him more sensitive, the Keating Five scandal was a near death experience that changed the way he saw himself and the system. McCain had been at best a reformer junior grade. In fact, he voted against campaign-reform measures before being sucked into the sewer himself. He used to brag about the pork he brought home to Arizona. When an opponent in the 1986 Senate race pointed out the massive campaign contributions that McCain was receiving from defense contractors, McCain accused him of running "one of the most sloppy and dirty campaigns in Arizona's history...
This is a much harder story to tell, not just for McCain but for all the candidates trying to capture voters' attention in a campaign season in which the markets are up and the world is peaceful and folks have so many other things on their mind. Even for a man with a great story, it's a hard sell. Maybe McCain is right to try to capture their imagination instead...