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Her memoir is as much a scathing critique of the Republican Party as it is a passionate tale of life on the campaign trail. McCain takes repeated jabs at the intolerant ethos of today's Republicans. She rails at feeling left out: The party, she says, has been hijacked by the right wing and has rejected -- to its detriment -- the moderate politics that she and millions of other young conservatives espouse.
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[S]he is both "passionately pro-life" and "passionately pro-contraception," and chastises conservatives for their narrowness of vision on the issue. "They go on and on about how evil and wrong abortion is, but don't like to talk about how easy it is to not get pregnant."
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When McCain met Sarah Palin, she "felt shaken and troubled," worrying like many others that the Alaska governor was not prepared for the national stage. . . . She blames the choice of Palin on a secret cabal of campaign advisers and particularly excoriates Steve Schmidt, whom she describes as "our bullying campaign manager."
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Once the Palin clan climbed aboard, the Pirate Ship started to sink. "From the minute Sarah arrived," McCain writes, "the campaign began splitting apart. And rather than joining us, and our campaign, she seemed only to begin her own."
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She ended the campaign feeling alienated from her party and worried about its domination by the Christian right. Calling herself a passionate Christian, McCain fears the party will shrink and possibly become irrelevant if it narrows its agenda to "accommodate only one moral code." On the night of her father's defeat, she felt gloomy enough to imagine the worst for the party. "That night," she writes, "I was standing at its funeral and saying good-bye."
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I remain convinced that long term the Christianists will be the death of the GOP. The question is one of when and how someone with charisma can wrench the party back from the Christo-fascists before the party becomes irrelevant.
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