Word: grahamism
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...Although it's true that George W. Bush, Steve Forbes and John McCain are all from what students of comparative religion call the boarding-school wing of the Episcopal church, Bush now belongs to a Methodist congregation. He apparently underwent a denominational transformation after a spiritual encounter with Billy Graham, an evangelist preacher whose vision of Hell is a world in which he does not get to play golf with the President. It's unclear whether Steve Forbes will continue his financial support of an effort to persuade members of his own congregation to abandon Planned Parenthood and blockade...
...said he was proud of the way I was handling myself with impeachment, and then he said he was thinking about running and building it around a new dynamic," says Graham. "Embrace reform, admit that money is a problem in Washington, and put a hero back before the public eye with a Republican name behind...
McCain knew Bush would be flush early on because of his daddy's name, so his bargain-basement strategy was to focus on New Hampshire and South Carolina. "If I do this," McCain told Graham, "I'm gonna need a guy like you who can help me in South Carolina...
...Graham was flattered but not bagged and said he'd sleep on it. He was no fan of McCain's failed effort that year to whack tobacco with a gargantuan sin tax. But he liked him well enough to lay out how to win South Carolina: go strong on the military and the restoration of dignity to the White House, hammer away at the Big Money interests in Washington and deliver the same straight message regardless of the polls, the day of the week or what part of the state you're standing...
...said things I'd been dying to hear from a leader," says Graham, who, like McCain, knew the G.O.P. was fat, slow and confused, kind of like Rush Limbaugh in his prime. "Nontraditional Republican things like campaign-finance reform, paying down the debt, Social Security restructuring, not going the way of huge tax cuts...