archives

Howard Kurtz in the WaPo:

When [reporter Steve] Kraske said that McCain presumably wasn't ruling out a [Social Security] payroll tax hike, McCain interrupted: "That's presuming wrong." When the reporter rephrased the question, McCain said: "If you want to keep asking me over and over again, you're welcome to."

It was a brief moment of friction that highlighted how the captain of the Straight Talk Express is having a bumpier ride with journalists than when he ran for president eight years ago. The popular image of the campaign — McCain bantering with national journalists in the back of his bus — has, in practice, all but vanished. [...]

McCain adviser Steve Duprey, a former chairman of New Hampshire's Republican Party, says "he'd love to be back on the bus, driving around with eight or 10 of you, and just riffing. In New Hampshire, if he'd say something that wasn't artfully phrased, there was more of a flow — he could revise something, or say let's talk about baseball. He'd get a pass. But in the age of blogs, there's always someone who makes a big deal out of it."

So apparently McCain's been making dumb statements for years, but his media fan club let him "revise" his mistakes instead of reporting on them.