• STEPHANOPOULOS: So on taxes, are you a “read my lips” candidate, no new taxes, no matter what?
• MCCAIN: No new taxes I do not — in fact, I could see an argument if our economy continues to deteriorate for lower interest rates, lower tax rates and certainly decreasing corporate tax rates, which are the second-highest in the world, giving people the ability to write off depreciation in a year, elimination of the AMT. There’s a lot of things that I would think we should to relieve that burden, including, obviously, as we all know, simplification of the tax code.
• STEPHANOPOULOS: But under no circumstances would you increase taxes?
• MCCAIN: No.

• STEPHANOPOULOS: So on taxes, are you a “read my lips” candidate, no new taxes, no matter what?
• MCCAIN: No new taxes I do not — in fact, I could see an argument if our economy continues to deteriorate for lower interest rates, lower tax rates and certainly decreasing corporate tax rates, which are the second-highest in the world, giving people the ability to write off depreciation in a year, elimination of the AMT. There’s a lot of things that I would think we should to relieve that burden, including, obviously, as we all know, simplification of the tax code.
• STEPHANOPOULOS: But under no circumstances would you increase taxes?
• MCCAIN: No.

At the Republican Convention in Detroit, Ronald Reagan worried about the depth of Bush's convictions. At first he resisted advice to choose for Vice President the man who had gotten the second most votes in the primaries. He privately disparaged Bush's ability to "stand up to the pressure of being President": "I'm concerned about turning the country over to him." But after former President Ford withdrew his name from consideration, Reagan swallowed his doubts, made the call, and asked Bush whether he could support the party platform, the most conservative in forty years.

This was no small question. During the primaries, Bush had derided Reagan's hallmark pledge to cut taxes while hugely increasing the defense budget as "voodoo economics." He had supported abortion rights. But, willing to pay the price for political rebirth, Bush immediately told Reagan that he could support the platform "wholeheartedly." .....

Bush's eight years as Reagan's number two were made miserable by his ostentatious effort to convince what he privately called the "extra-chromosome" conservatives that he was not some kind of closet one-world liberal. Bush's vice-presidential predecessor, Walter Mondale, had warned him after the 1980 election that "a President does not want and the public does not respect a Vice President who does nothing but deliver fulsome praise of a President." ....

But Bush now felt his only chance for President in 1988 lay in winning over Reagan and his increasingly dominant wing of the party. On the simple level of private character, he showed admirable loyalty. More than any other vice president of the post-war era, Bush refused to allow sunlight between himself and his President. He eschewed background interviews with reporters designed to make himself look good at the boss's expense and used all public opportunities to demonstrate himself as a Reaganite, at one moment incautiously saying, "I'm for Mr. Reagan, blindly!" He defended himself by saying that in his family, loyalty was "not considered a character flaw."

It was the unrelenting ardor of that loyalty, from a Vice President who had once so disagreed with the Reaganites, that critics considered a character flaw. .......

During the (1988) campaign, Bush had encouraged the impression that his first years in office might be tantamount to Reagan's third term, with many Reagan appointees held over and the former President perhaps flown in from California from time to time as a kind of political godfather. That did not happen. Few high officials survived from the era of Reagan into that of Bush. During the Bush presidency, the forty-first President, who still held the hearts of most Republicans and to whom Bush owed his office, appeared in the White House exactly twice. Many conservatives suspected that by thumbing his nose at Reaganism, the new President, intoxicated by victory, was paying them back for all the years of humiliations while courting the right.

If they were correct, Bush was showing dangerous hubris and self-indulgence. The Republican Party, if anything, was growing more conservative than ever. If Bush did not wish to expend the effort to try moving his party to the center, as Eisenhower had attempted and failed to do, it would have been more sensible for the President to show that he understood the balance of forces within his party. But, buoyed by his high approval ratings, Bush gave signs of allowing himself to believe that he was unsinkable. His "what-me-worry?" attitude culminated in July 1990, when he reneged on his supreme campaign promise not to raise taxes. This told conservatives once and for all that Bush was not really one of them. .....