By Robert Schlesinger
Michael Isikoff of Newsweek was one of the reporters tracking the McCain-Iseman story, and weighed in today with this tidbit — apparently more of what McCain said in his blanket denial was not so true.
From Newsweek.com:
Just hours after the Times’s story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff—and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement e-mailed to reporters.
But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the Sept. 25, 2002, deposition obtained by NEWSWEEK. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”
Well let’s just keep the focus on sex, shall we?
UPDATE: Josh Marshall nails what could become McCain’s problem (extended excerpt after the jump).
Let’s step back for a moment from this particular ‘misrecollection’. Watching McCain over the last couple days particularly and in general over many years, the guy really has a problem with making blanket and obviously false denials. In fact, the obviousness is often so extreme that it can’t be a matter of strategy, at least not in a very thought out sense. In this case, he makes a blanket statement and there’s a written record of McCain himself contradicting his statement. You’ll notice also yesterday he grandly stated that he’d never spoken with the Times about the story. Then about 30 seconds later a reporter brought up the pretty obvious point that, well … the article discusses McCain’s talk with Bill Keller. And of course McCain quickly backtracks, since clearly what he had just said was completely ridiculous.
You’ll also notice, though I’m not sure anyone has really made this point that clearly, that he also claimed that he and his office hadn’t tried to prevent the Times from publishing the story. Well, pulling out all the stops and having all these conversations with the Times and hiring Bob Bennett to go toe to toe with them probably counts as trying to stop the story.
Then there’s this video ThinkProgress came up with yesterday where McCain tells a New Hampshire townhall meeting that he says: “Everybody says that they’re against the special interests. I’m the only one the special interests don’t give any money to.”
It’s almost too ridiculous to even try refuting. Needless to say McCain gets tons of money and always has from pretty much all the same special interests that everyone else gets money from.
There’s no way of getting around the fact that McCain routinely, almost constantly, issues categorical denials that are demonstrably false. The very volume and clarity of the bogusness of so many of these statements might even be viewed as his best defense.
This could become a problem for McCain if the press picks it up — a questionable proposition because, as Marshall points out, the statements are so obviously bogus and because it would go against the “straight-talking” meme that McCain has established.
1 Comment
February 22, 2008 at 2:22 pm
Or even worse….that he is getting kind of dotty in his old age.
His biggest risk in the general election could be coming across, like Bob Dole in 1996, as a nice enough guy, a war hero to be “revered” as Obama slyly puts it, but from another era and out of touch.