For much of the last year, McCain has triumphantly carried the conservative standard. "I was part of the Reagan revolution. . . . I was proud to be a foot soldier," McCain said at the 40th president's library this year. "I'm prepared to follow in his tradition and in his footsteps."
When he accepted the nomination last month in Minnesota, McCain put the federal government in the crosshairs.
He criticized bureaucrats, pledged to cut government spending and accused his political colleagues of breaking faith with voters by expanding Washington.
"Rather than reform government," he told his cheering supporters, "both parties made it bigger."
The rhetoric placed McCain in the mainstream of public opinion. For more than a quarter century, most Americans have said they think government regulation does more harm than good, according to the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.
As a lawmaker, McCain has taken broad swipes at government oversight.
After Republicans captured control of Congress in 1994 by running a sharply anti-government campaign, McCain and 37 GOP senators pushed legislation to place a yearlong moratorium on all regulatory rule-making.
McCain even helped kill efforts to exempt from the moratorium new regulations for clean drinking water and meat inspections. A less restrictive compromise ultimately passed with bipartisan support.
A year later, McCain was one of five senators to vote against a bill to deregulate telecommunications. He believed it did not go far enough.
McCain has also worked closely with lawmakers who wanted to relax federal oversight of the banking and financial services industry, including former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, until recently a senior advisor to the McCain campaign.
"He's an extreme free-marketer," Consumer Federation of America research director Mark Cooper said of McCain.
McCain kept up his anti-government rhetoric throughout his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination. In one October 1999 primary debate in Durham, N.H., he attributed the decade's "almost unprecedented prosperity" partly to "a lack of regulation."
Yet there has long been another side to McCain.
Facing popular outrage over defective vehicles, or tobacco marketing to minors, or airline flight delays, the senator has responded with moral indignation and surprisingly zealous efforts to enact more regulation.
