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McCain: Americans 'Rejected Us'
On the heels of devastating GOP losses, Sen. John McCain said "no defeat is permanent" as he called for the Republican Party to return to its common-sense conservatism - and implicitly cast himself as the one who can lead the party's rebirth.
"We lost our principles and our majority. And there is no way to recover our majority without recovering our principles first," the Arizona Republican said Thursday in the first of two speeches that could set the tone for a potential presidential campaign.
On the same day he launched a presidential exploratory committee, McCain said voters felt that Republicans valued their incumbency over their beliefs on such conservative standards as limited and efficient government - and he urged a return to those tenets.
"Americans had elected us to change government, and they rejected us because they believed government had changed us," the four-term senator said. "We must spend the next two years reacquainting the public and ourselves with the reason we came to office in the first place: to serve a cause greater than our self-interest."
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He spoke before members of the Federalist Society, the organization of more than 25,000 conservatives and libertarians including high-profile members of the Bush administration, the federal judiciary and Congress. Later Thursday, he was delivering a broader speech about the future of the Republican Party to another conservative pillar, GOPAC.
© 2006 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
2006 Elections
Inside Cover Stories
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