Word: reforms
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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McCain's Big Picture was on display last week during his New Hampshire victory speech. "They said there wasn't room for reform in the Republican Party," he crowed. "Well, we've made room." The next day in South Carolina, he said his campaign would attract not just "hard-core Republicans" but also "Reagan Democrats and independents--I think that's a sign of electability. I would like to preserve our Republican base and make [it] attractive to Democrats the same way Ronald Reagan did." That could be the most crucial lesson McCain learned from any of his heroes: become...
...such happiness and plenty. McCain's genius has been to understand that it is precisely this affluence and good cheer that make genuine ideas irrelevant. As the American economy churns and rumbles and sprays money this way and that, a message of ideological consistency would seem like mere pedantry. Reform, on the other hand, is a rubric under which people can toss all their small residual grievances, their nagging unsatisfied wants, whatever they are. Medicare? Gun control? Your failing school? Reform must be the answer. A revolutionary who promises to keep everything essential in place (the tax code, the military...
McCain's image as a revolutionary rests, instead, on the word he repeats like a mantra: reform. For the most part, his reforms are unspecified or constantly evolving--he has sponsored several different versions of campaign-finance reform, for example--but to the extent he has a message, this is it: "Government has been taken from us. Let's go take it back...
...tell you what it is. One of the neglected curiosities of this presidential-campaign season is how remarkably substantial and sophisticated it has been. The candidates have unloosed a blizzard of paper. There are fact sheets on child care, four-step plans to save Medicare, backgrounders on Medicaid reform and transportation subsidies and the tax code's deduction for dependent children. Down in Austin, Texas, Bush has assembled an entire shadow government of policy wonks to translate the gaseous cloud of his compassionate conservatism into the hard data of tax tables and impact studies...
...dirtball. He is ending his political career on a different note. Some of the quickest, surest political friendships he has formed are with left-leaning Democrats. In the past two years he has befriended Democratic Senator Russell Feingold, in part because they share an interest in campaign-finance reform but mainly because he admires Feingold's nerve and honesty. At the same time he has antagonized Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, mainly because he thinks he's a creep. Indeed, except on one occasion, I have been unable to detect in McCain any of the usual Republican prejudices. That exception...