Word: mccain
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...stick it did, in part because McCain worked so hard initially to align himself with the White House. In order to win the GOP nomination, McCain embraced tax cuts he had once opposed, promised to appoint activist conservative jurists to the Supreme Court to advance social causes he had never cared much about and boasted of his support for the agenda of a President he had once famously loathed. McCain played down the risk he was running. "I've already been accused of changing," McCain told me at the start of his campaign. "I haven't. I'm the same...
...McCain's swing to the right during the primaries still wasn't enough to win over many conservatives. That forced him to pursue a strategy during the general election that put galvanizing the Republican base ahead of inspiring centrist swing voters. By selecting as his running mate Sarah Palin, an inexperienced favorite of conservatives, over alternatives who would have appealed to independents, McCain not only missed a chance to win over those voters but also undermined his greatest advantage over Barack Obama - his deep record on national security. At a critical moment, McCain simply gave the experience card away...
...Finally, the candidate who had promised a civil and elevated debate wound up waging a reckless, spaghetti-on-the-wall character assault - Obama's a vacuous celebrity! A dangerous naif! A friend to terrorists! A closet socialist! - against an opponent whose preternatural poise made McCain's every charge seem desperate. He convinced himself that Obama was dishonorable and unqualified and was persuaded by his aides to believe that the only way to win was to make the Democrat seem unacceptable to voters. As a result, McCain reaped the worst of all worlds: voters saw McCain as both a Bush clone...
...Given the twin burdens he bore of a dismally unpopular incumbent Republican President and an already staggering economy that fell off a cliff in October, it is possible that McCain never had a chance. For all his cred as a maverick, McCain built that reputation on issues like tobacco, campaign finance, pork-barrel spending, immigration and torture, all of which were peripheral to the general-election debate. Meanwhile, on problems that worried voters most - the economy, health care, jobs - neither McCain's record in the past nor his proposals for the future were distinguishable from the standard Republican fare promoted...
...campaign closed, a common fantasy among some of McCain's old associates went like this: the old bomber pilot would pull back on the stick before Election Day, right his wobbly plane and mount a clean push for victory. Instead, McCain just corkscrewed into the ground. And so it will be important to see what lessons McCain learns from his campaign and what role he plays as a member of a shrunken minority in Congress. Will he harbor bitter memories of his defeat and the poor treatment he feels he received from his old friends in the national media...