GREENVILLE, S.C. — With a rebel's zeal, Sen. John McCain pledged to "take our government back from the power brokers" in his 2000 run for the White House. Crowds packed town halls and fire stations to hear the iconoclastic Republican from Arizona. His bursts of candor sparked thunderous applause.
Launching his second presidential bid Wednesday in a New Hampshire park, McCain, 70, was a man of diminished vigor. Wearing a navy-blue pullover, he spoke with little fervor to a subdued crowd of a few hundred. Antiwar demonstrators watched from behind metal barricades. Grimmer was the scene the next day at his South Carolina kickoff rally: Fewer than 100 supporters showed up.
McCain's cross-country "announcement tour" was supposed to mark a fresh start for his troubled campaign and give him momentum in the GOP primary race, where many national polls show him trailing former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani by double digits.
Instead, it illustrated the difficulties the senator faces in reconciling the freewheeling maverick of 2000 with the more restrained McCain who is struggling to cement conservative support for 2008.
His denouncing of "platitudes," "unkept promises" and "old politics" sounded like the McCain of old, the reformer of 2000 who fired the imagination with tell-it-like-it-is rhetoric.
Yet by tailoring his remarks on Iraq and other topics to heighten his appeal to Republican primary voters, McCain underscored how hard it would be to recapture his image as a no-nonsense outsider unyielding to political pressures.
In South Carolina, reporters asked McCain why he supported extending President Bush's tax cuts, which he once denounced as so skewed to the rich that he could not vote for them "in good conscience."
To vote against the tax-cut extensions, he answered, would have "the effect of a tax increase."
His care to avoid offending Republican voters also surfaced after six men showed up outside a South Carolina rally waving Confederate flags, which he described in 2000 as a "symbol of racism and slavery."
Prodded by reporters to share his thoughts on the group's flag-waving, McCain said: "Welcome to South Carolina. It's a free country."
Also at odds with McCain's reputation for speaking his mind whatever the cost: his maneuvering last week on the Iraq war. He is the only major Republican contender to make support for Bush's recent troop buildup a focus of his campaign.
