McCain vs. Obama: Whose fault is it?
Posted: Thursday, August 07, 2008 9:22 AM by Mark Murray
The Washington Post's David Broder interviews both candidates on the tone of the campaign, gets them both to profess disappointment and gets them both to blame the other for going down this slippery slope. “‘I'm very sorry about it," McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. ‘I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings’ together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.”
More: “I asked Obama if he had any regrets about turning down McCain's early June invitation to start the joint appearances back then. He said, ‘I think the notion that somehow as a consequence of not having joint appearances, Senator McCain felt obliged to suggest that I'd rather lose a war to win a campaign doesn't automatically follow. I think we each have control over ourselves and our campaigns, and we have to take responsibility for that.’”
“A CBS News survey released yesterday, showing Obama with a 45 percent to 39 percent national lead, reported that 30 percent of voters said the vice presidential pick will have ‘a great deal of influence’ on their vote -- double the percentage who said so in the 2000 election. Nearly half of the 13 percent of voters calling themselves undecided said that the choice of running mate will make a difference.”
“Senators Barack Obama and John McCain tussled again yesterday over energy policy, taunting each other over who had the most inane conservation idea as much as debating substantive differences,” the Boston Globe writes. “McCain has been mocking Obama for days for suggesting that one way to ease the energy crisis is to keep tires properly inflated.
So the Obama campaign jumped on a comment McCain made Tuesday night: ‘Senator Obama a couple of days ago said that we ought to all inflate our tires, and I don't disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it.’ But the McCain campaign accused Obama's campaign of selectively editing the comment, noting that the presumptive GOP nominee added, ‘But I also don't think that that's a way to become energy independent.’ Then, the Obama campaign highlighted McCain's suggestion in April: ‘We can turn out the lights five minutes earlier, we don't have to drive the extra block.’”
The Washington Post's Ignatius makes the case for either keeping Robert Gates on -- no matter who wins, or assigning him a new project. "Why not appoint Gates to head a special commission to revise the basic framework of the National Security Act of 1947? He knows all the pieces of this puzzle -- having run the CIA and worked at the National Security Council earlier in his career.”
