John McCain’s 2000 Campaign and the Republican Road Not Taken

In 2000, John McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” barreled down what has become the road not taken for the Republican Party. McCain’s 2000 bid for the GOP presidential nomination is best remembered for his irreverence in the hours he spent happily jousting with reporters on the bus while his campaign strategists abandoned any hope of controlling, much less directing, his message.

But in his insurgent campaign that year against front-runner George W. Bush, McCain also sketched an expansive and inclusive reform-oriented conservatism that harkened back to the early-20th-century vision of Theodore Roosevelt. In the process, McCain advanced a set of priorities and approaches that could still provide inspiration for the small band of Republicans looking to redirect the party from Donald Trump’s divisive and racially infused nationalism—even if McCain himself can no longer lead that fight.

McCain was never a systematic thinker and he would often roll his eyes at rivals who burnished their own agendas with grand labels (like Bill Clinton’s The New Covenant or Bush’s Compassionate Conservatism.) But in the heyday of his maverick period—roughly the decade from the middle of Clinton’s presidency through the second half of Bush’s—McCain created an ideology on the fly, through the causes and commitments he embraced.

During those peak maverick years, McCain venerated above all the notions