Word: gop
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Honor Bound These days, there is a new McCain on the campaign trail. He has forsworn his freewheeling sessions of straight talk with the press, sticking religiously to GOP talking points, bottled up by a campaign that is highly disciplined, curiously hostile to reporters and quick to launch negative and often misleading attacks. During a brief, weird and remarkably uninformative interview, TIME asked him about the abrupt shift in strategy. The candidate who used to spend hours kibitzing with reporters refused to acknowledge that anything has changed. "I don't know what you're talking about," McCain said, staring blankly...
...McCain's GOP colleagues have not always appreciated his moral crusading or his suggestions that any disagreement with "St. John" about soft-money rules was somehow tantamount to corruption. "He was so condescending. If you weren't with him, you were obviously wrong," Smith says. And McCain sometimes approached debate the way he approached boxing as a midshipman, throwing wild haymakers until someone went down. He has offended the clubby Senate with his sailor's mouth, cursing at Pete Domenici of New Mexico over pork, John Cornyn of Texas over immigration and even the Mormon Orrin Hatch of Utah over...
McCain's enemies say he lacks the temperament to be President; his friends say he is just a spirited fighter who isn't afraid of taking on sacred cows. Some of McCain's worst enemies have been GOP appropriators like Domenici, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who has said the thought of a President McCain sends a cold chill down his spine. McCain has been a relentless critic of congressional pork and has made a point of publicizing the pet-project earmarks that appropriators slip into budget bills. "He ruffles a lot of feathers because...
...Cochran has endorsed McCain's candidacy now that he's the Republican nominee. "McCain used to make great speeches about all the garbage in military spending bills, especially after 9/11, but he'd do nothing to stop it," says the Center for Defense Information's Winslow Wheeler, a former GOP staffer who supports Obama for President. McCain "got the porkbuster reputation, but he never strayed too far off the reservation...
...even though George W. Bush supporters were spreading vicious lies about him. Bush soon co-opted McCain's message - he too vowed to be "a reformer with results" - all the way to the White House. And McCain spent the next several years picking fights with Bush and the GOP establishment over campaign finance, health care, gun control and the President's massive tax cuts, which McCain characterized as fiscally irresponsible. The battles burnished his maverick image, but critics within the party attributed them mostly to vanity and sour grapes. "He was just grumpy about losing to Bush," says Grover Norquist...