Word: republican
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...Sarah Palin's post-convention bounce dissipates, an ongoing conservative revolt in Arizona has been gaining steam. It probably won't cost McCain the state. But 26 years after the Republican was sent to Congress from Arizona, the schism within the state GOP points to lingering doubts that the right wing - both inside and outside Arizona - has about McCain's motives, methods and temperament. And in an unusually brutal state primary season that ended Sept. 2, suspicion about the Republican nominee led the conservative grass roots to air accusations of persecution and dirty politics...
...There's a civil war going on in the Republican Party here," says David Berman, a professor emeritus with Arizona State University and a longtime observer of Arizona politics. "The division has severed off the business people from the social conservatives." Berman says that McCain's allies fought Pearce fiercely in the GOP primary for an open state senate seat, going so far as hiring hard-hitting political consultant Nathan Sproul to hammer away at Pearce. "They hired one of the sleaziest operators around," says Berman, "who used to only do this thing to Democrats...
...Pearce won the primary with almost 70% of the vote in the very conservative Mesa senate district, and he is heavily favored to win the general election. But just as bitter has been the fight for the smaller prizes of key positions within the local branches of the state Republican Party...
...Another conservative activist, who works in state government and worries that using his name will cost him his job, charges that McCain has gone out of his way to disrespect the conservative grass roots. Ahead of the 2004 Republican National Convention, he says, Senator McCain personally called several conservative delegates to try to rescind their invitations to the New York City gathering. The source says, "He wanted his own hand-picked people to go to the convention, to be the bestower," even though the grass-roots party members had done most of the grunt work in organizing and mobilizing...
With both national and battleground-state polls showing John McCain losing ground to Barack Obama in recent weeks, the Republican presidential nominee is getting a lot of unsolicited advice. Party professionals around the country are publicly calling on McCain to change the subject from the nation's faltering economy by becoming much more aggressive in his attacks against Obama. Go after the Illinois Senator on his ties to his controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, some urge, or attack Obama's associations with convicted Chicago real estate developer Tony Rezko or former '60s radical Bill Ayers...