Yeow. As I write this, I am watching Arizona Sen. John McCain in an interview with Tim Russert on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He looks and sounds exhausted. I wonder, did his handlers advise him to behave like a golden retriever pup that had been kicked around for the last two weeks?

Can you see the campaign consultants hovering around McCain in the green room prior to his studio appearance?

Handlers: “John, John. You’re a front-runner for 2008. You’re now knee-deep in — let’s face it — support of a very bad policy to send more troops to Iraq. The last image you want to portray is war monger! Now is the time to act humble, pal. Passive. Um, thoughtful, even.”

A little peek at the interview, if you missed it (and I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t be wide-eyed and glued to the tube at 8 a.m. on a Sunday):

Russert asks for McCain’s reaction to a MoveOn.org ad that paints McCain as the real architect of the surge. Russert refers to it as the “McCain Doctrine.”

McCain says it’s actually more of a “principle,” and with a big smile — emotion, can you dig it! — he quips, “not everyone gets a doctrine named after them.”

In response on the same program, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy argues we’ve already had four troop surges in Iraq. None have been successful. And this: The American people never voted to support a civil war in Iraq.

And how.

Still, McCain–who again, by way of stark reminder, wants to be the next president–tells us “we now have a strategy that can succeed. … We can turn the numbers around.”

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 7:57 am and is filed under All, Politics, Community, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.