Don’t listen to John McCain.
That is all.
You think I’m making this up?
Sadly, even I am not that ingenious. For months, I and I’m sure many of us have long suspected that not only are campaigns and their candidates not always on the same page but that their campaigns work not on behalf of whatever ill-informed boob they precariously balance on a stump but on behalf of their party.
Time and again, we’ve seen John McCain speaking out on various issues that are contrary to his campaign’s (Read: The GOP’s) official line. Last Sunday, McCain told George Stephanopoulos on national TV that he hasn’t ruled out raising the payroll tax in reference to fixing Social Security.
Two days later on Fox “News”, McCain spokeman Tucker Bounds told Megyn Kelly that “(T)here is no imaginable circumstance where John McCain would raise payroll taxes. It’s absolutely out of the question.” This isn’t a mere anomaly, either. As Think Progress points out, this is the third time just this week that McCain’s campaign has said that McCain wasn’t speaking for the campaign.
Translation: “Don’t listen to John McCain. Just vote for him. Well, actually, you’re not voting for him. You’re voting for the campaign (Again, read: The GOP.).”
This marks the first time, in my memory, that an election campaign has come out and admitted that its candidate is irrelevant. I’ve heard and seen candidates say (as with the Phil Gramm “whiners comment”) that people within their campaign weren’t speaking for them.
Never before now have I ever heard a campaign staffer say that a candidate wasn’t speaking for the campaign.
So, for whose campaign was McCain speaking? Obama’s?
Ordinarily, I’d go hog wild on this and be making all sorts of "empty vessel" and "male love doll" references but I can barely stop laughing long enough to correctly type these words so just go to Think Progress and read it for yourself.