More Ado About Nothing

Lying awake at 4:30am, I wanted to weigh in on the latest little flap surrounding John McCain and CNN's Rick Sanchez: Give It A Rest, people!

For those who missed this non-story, at a McCain campaign stop a couple of days ago, a McCain supporter who apparently thought she was being cute, asked Senator McCain “How do we beat the bitch?”. Clearly, this was a reference to Hillary Clinton, and the buzz among Democratic-leaning blogs is that this proves that McCain's talk about civility and higher discourse is bogus, and that he's just as rude as the rest of us.

But let's put it into perspective: There's no evidence that McCain staffers planted the question. McCain (and all of the candidates) are going around the country speaking to thousands of supporters at hundreds of campaign stops, there are going to be people who, in highly pro-candidate crowds, will ask questions in “cute” ways.

So what were McCain's options in this case? He could immediately put the supporter in her place, which would serve subtly to tell his supporters that he didn't really have their back the moment he disagreed with them. He could ignore the form of the question and answer the substance. Or he could momentarily forget that with YouTube, there's no longer such a thing as a completely private room and laugh it off with some of his die-hard supporters, answering the question and making sure to get in a line about his respect for Senator Clinton to make it clear that he was not referring to her as a bitch, without alienating any of his supporters.

Senator McCain is not winning right now but is on an upswing, and took the opportunity to point out (correctly) that in recent polls, he's the only major Republican candidate who shows any real chance of defeating Senator Clinton in a hypothetical match-up. For him, it's a much better strategy than one that might push even a few votes away from him.

This is just another in the long list of cases (in every walk of political life) where someone slimes an opponent by pointing to something one of their supporters says and then saying “And he/she didn't denounce it”. If we really expect our political candidates to robustly denounce anything said by anyone among their supporters, in their party or sharing their ideological views, our presidential candidates will spend all of their time issuing condemnations of extreme positions.

Liam.