McCain campaign manager was for McCain’s record before he was against it

August 11, 2008

Of all the various interviews on the Sunday morning shows, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis’ appearance on “Fox News Sunday” was likely to be the least interesting. The head of the Republican campaign on the Republican network? Not exactly must-see TV.

But FNC’s Chris Wallace was actually at the top of his game yesterday, and raised hard-hitting questions that left Davis looking unusually bad.

Take this exchange, for example:

There was no doubt the McCain gang was inviting this; I’m just surprised someone in the media was willing to bring it up. McCain’s new ad says the nation is worse off now than it was four years ago, but as Wallace noted, McCain, as recently as a year ago, was voting with the Bush line 95% of the time. Given this, shouldn’t McCain bear some of the responsibility?

“Well, look, if you want to talk about history, then you can make all of the cases you want to make,” Davis responded. He added that McCain has been a maverick and “the biggest irritant” to the Bush administration. I haven’t the foggiest idea what that means — if McCain votes with Bush 95% of the time, then he obviously isn’t an irritant or a maverick; he’s the opposite of an irritant or a maverick.

“But I’ve got to come back at you,” Wallace said. “If you say the country is worse off than it was four years ago, clearly the president has got to bear some of the responsibility, and by his own record, his own admission, John McCain voted with the president, last year, 95% of the time.”

Point, set, match. Davis said something about those votes not mattering too much, but it was too late — Wallace had already destroyed the McCain campaign’s claim.

There was more, too. Here’s Davis struggling to explain his lobbying role in the DHL deal in Ohio:

And here’s Davis struggling to explain why Dick Cheney is speaking at the Republican convention.

“You’ll never find John McCain changing his stripes just because of an election,” Davis said.

Um, Rick? I’m going to assume you haven’t seen my list….

Nevertheless, kudos to Wallace for hosting a hard-hitting interview. As Mark Kleiman noted, “I guess [Davis] wasn’t expecting L’Osservatore Romano to criticize the Pope. I’m hoping this will give reporters at non-Republican networks license to ask some of the same tough questions.”

I’m hoping the same.

Sometimes a maverick is just a lost cow.

  • “Well, look, if you want to talk about history, then you can make all of the cases you want to make…”

    This statement is really priceless. It sums up the entire McCain approach, nothing means anything.

  • So McCainiac’s voting record up to last year is “History” (which in GOP speak means Too long ago to matter unless we’re talking about WWII). But Four years ago is Not History and very relevant and important.

    These people haven’t brought a knife to a gun fight. They’ve brought a bunch of nerf balls and Silly String.

  • Wait – Chris Wallace was asking tough questions? Of a Republican? What?

    I wonder if Chris is upset that McCain has started criticizing W. Chris has been a W cheerleader for a number of years, and being critical of W probably doesn’t set right with him.

    OTOH – this is seriously WTF:

    “Well, look, if you want to talk about history, then you can make all of the cases you want to make,”n

    I call shenanigans. McCain’s campaign has devolved into parody. This isn’t a campaign – it’s performance art. They’re now mangling Simpson’s quotes to make their arguments. He might as well have used the original quote: “Facts? Pfft. You can use those to prove anything that’s even remotely true.”

  • I’m looking forward to an appropriate clip of this interview showing up in an Obama ad very soon – a Fox News interviewer embarrassing a McCain staffer with McCain’s own voting record. Worth its weight in gold.

  • Looks like Fox might realize that if they keep playing their role as the Republican Stooge Network, they might lose even more market share.

    I guess we should thank them for getting a clue.

  • This election will either repudiate the Bush presidency, or sanction it. McCain has worked 24/7 to continue Bush’s ill-fated policies, and so he and his team got nothing new for us. It is now obvious McCain’s top man got spanked by a friendly network for having nothing. Now Obama, he got something – better advisers, better policy proposals, and better credibility regarding hope. Oh, now what is a McCain to do? -Kevo

  • conspiracy theory du jour: the right-wing media will spend some time piling on MCain, so when they start kissing his ass & borderline-endorsing him, it comes across as some kind of “vetting.” A whole we have confronted McCain, looked in his heart, & can say he is pure & just & good” kinda horse hockey.

  • I hate to admit it, but Chris Wallace does have his moments. He smacked down the “Fox and Friends” idiots for their stupidity earlier this year, so this isn’t entirely surprising.

    But wow, Rick Davis looked like an utter moron. This is win-win. Either this blow-dried moron remains a public face for the campaign, or they drop him and have yet another shakeup.

  • I think RacerX has it right. Not that FOX sees the writing on the wall and has made an abrupt U-turn – rather they see the writing on the wall and realize that to survive, they’re going to have to moderate their radical right wing positions.
    Their function as the Republiklan Wurlitzer will be pointless if no one is willing to drop a quarter in the slot.

  • The thing to remember about Fox (and all t he media outlets) is that money is their political party. They will throw the Republicans under the bus if their business model says that’s what will make the most money. When we focus our energy on them, we need to remember what they really believe and what they really value. It’s like knowing the weak points and joint limitations in the human body as you engage in Karate.

  • The thing to remember about Fox (and all t he media outlets) is that money is their political party.

    I’ll believe that FOX is more beholden to money than to ideology when Roger Ailes leaves the helm.

    I’m fairly certain that Roger Ailes equates “Republicans in power” with “money in the bank”, so until he leaves I’m not willing to give FOX News even a shred of “benefit of the doubt”.

    I’m going to stick with “far right Republicans just don’t like McCain” until I see evidence to the contrary. That and “hardcore Republican partisans don’t like seeing W smacked around”, of course.

  • I won’t be issuing any kudos to Wallace. Why? I have one word for you: Rove.

    My guess is that Wallace is being tough on Rich Davis in the service of Team Rove member Steve Schmidt and that this is a sign of an internal power struggle with in the McCain campaign. Remember Davis has already been removed from the job of day-to-day management of the campaign in favor of Steve Schmidt.

  • “Sometimes a maverick is just a lost cow.”

    Ohmigawd, N.Wells, with your permission, I’m going to start printing and handing out tee-shirts immediately!

  • Davis claims in this interview that Obama has never joined with Republicans across the aisle.

    LIAR.

    Lugar-Obama proliferation and threat reduction initiative into law, signed into law by bush (Richard Lugar is a high-ranking Republican)

    Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act co-sponsored by Obama, Coburn (Republican), and Carper, signed into law by bush

    “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act” co-sponsored legislation by McCain, Republican (Um, Rick???)

    Joined Chuck Hagel, Republican of Nebraska, in introducing legislation to reduce risks of nuclear terrorism; a provision from the Obama-Hagel bill was passed by Congress in December 2007

    Passed legislation with Republican Senator Jim Talent to give gas stations a tax credit for installing E85 ethanol refueling pumps

    I’m sure there are more. Feel free to pile on Davis.

  • RacerX:
    What you say is true — for the most part, ironically the one partial exception is Fox — the spin you put on it is a little dubious. You, like a lot of people who post here don’t entirely get the difference between ‘corporate’ and ‘entrepreneur’ capitalism.

    If a company is, primarily, owned by one person, he can do what he wants, even if, for legal reasons, the company is organized as a corporation. (Easy example, think Steinbrenner and the Yankees during George’s heyday.) In news, this has resulted in some of the best and worst examples. Bertie McCormick, Scaife, and Murdoch are good examples of the worst, the early owners of CBS and Ted Turner’s CNN among the best.

    The point is, if it’s my money, I can do what I like, because I am the only — or main –one who suffers or gains from it. I can attack the King of England (Bertie) or be as scurrilous as I was in England and Australia (Murdoch). At the same time, I can keep a show on the air, news or entertainment, because I just like it. I can let an Ed Murrow attack McCarthy, or support Woodward and Bernstein, or get really good reporters to work on my new idea of a 24-hour news channel.

    BUT if the company is truly a corporation, owned by thousands or millions of faceless owners, I can’t think that way if I am on the board of directors. (Btrw, yes, I know the following is an over-simplification — but even I am not so long-winded as to deal with the various matters that are involved that modify what I say.) I can’t poll the stockholders every hour to find out what they ‘really want’ — and in many cases, with pension funds and mutual funds, it isn’t always possible to know who the stockholders are.

    My legal responsibility is to them, and my assumption has to be that the reason they invested in the stock is because they wanted the most money possible back on their investment — unless they have told me differently by the way they voted in the annual vote for the Board.

    I vote for a management team (CEO, CFO, COO) who have the same responsibility. Now the one ‘saving grace’ is that they can always argue that ‘quality will give good will, which is a financial benefit.’ (On the other hand — see Enron, Penn Square, etc. — they can also argue that spending $2,000,000 on a painting for the boss’s office will give prestige, which will result in profits in the long run.) What they can’t do legally is argue “I like hockey, or curling, so even though the ratings are low, I want our station to run it” because they aren’t playing with their own money, but the stockholders.

    And media companies are particularly difficult, because we don’t pay for what we get, either in entertainment or news. There used to be a rule of thumb that the cost of a newspaper pays for the paper it is printed on — and that’s all. (With the price of paper up, it doesn’t even pay for that.) Every other expense, from paying the reporters’ salaries to the electricity that keeps the light bulbs burning, to the toilet paper in the bathrooms, comes from advertisers.

    With television, it is even worse, because we don’t pay practically anything for what we receive — and nothing at all for ‘over the air’ stations. EVERYTHING comes for advertisers, or, in the case of CPB, from ‘corporate sponsorship’ (think Mobil for MYSTERY and MASTERPIECE THEATER) who are using the ‘good will’ escape clause, a dwindling but still important amount from the government (which means they have to justify their decisions to Congress — and remember who ran if for a decade before the 2006 elections (and, as I’ve pointed out, Democrats may have a numerical majority, but they still don’t have an ideological one — yet) and from ‘viewers like you’ (and don’t you all LOVE pledge weeks).

    But back to commercial publishing and broadcasting. Advertisers want to use their money wisely, and understandably so. Which means they want to reach the most people and the ‘right kind’ of people. (You don’t try and sell Metamucil on a show watched by the 18-24 yr old bracket, or on POKEMON to make the point stronger.)

    But this brings us to ‘the ratings’ which were dubious when all that existed was three networks and a handful of local channels. (The ‘nationakl ratings’ made a little sense, the local ones didn’t — and the people in tv, the advertisers and the guys who sold the ads to them all knew it — at one time my best friend worked in that end of tv, part of one of the major companies helping local stations choose the shows they should buy in syndication — but it was the only thing they had.)

    Now, with everyone recording one program and watching another, or watching a show months after it ran — and fast forwarding through the commercials — and with hundreds of choices rather than a half dozen, ratings are ridiculous, but they are still all they have. (If one Keith fan is in the bathroom when the phone rings, or doesn’t choose to keep a diary, and one BillO fan does, advertisers think that 10,000 viewers prefer BillO to Keith — or vice versa.)

    Ratings would make sense only if every tv set or cable box or satellite kept a record of what we were watching (or recording). Anybody want to guess how many milliseconds it would be before the more paranoid among us — on either the left or the right — started screaming “INVASION OF PRIVACY — THEY ARE WATCHING US — FASCISTS (or NEW WORLD ORDER)!!!!!!!!!!”

    So put the various pieces I gave you together, add in the tendency on both sides to assume the media is ‘biased against them’ if they are (for us) to the right of Rachel Maddow or (to the other side) to the left of Hannity.

    Okay, the system is broken — not for malevolent reasons but for practical ones.

    You tell us how to fix it, because I sure can’t.

    [Sorry for how long this was — and I over-simplified things.]

  • Out of all the Fox douche bags, Wallace has long been the most decent of the bunch. While he carries a lot of GOP water, he will on occasion buck the party line. Kudos.

  • When we hear Republicans in general, and specifically conservatives and neo-cons complaining for a few months that Fox News is part of the liberal media; only then can you assume that Fox News is getting a ‘little’ closer to reporting what needs to be said.

  • Prup,
    Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine and give the oversight agency real powers of investigation and enforcement–I.e. The ability to levy massive fines. That’s one way to fix it.

  • It’ll help — a little. (I do support it, but we no more want fairness than do the Republicans. We think — as do they — that ‘fairness’ means ‘seeing things our way’ — perfectly natural, but — fortunately — not enforceable.)

    How many times have we listed media people criticizing McCain and then still condemned them for ‘being in the tank’ for him.

  • Wallace still allowed Davis to spout pure propaganda…due to time constraints I’m sure…but saying McCain is a thorn in the side of Bush or that Obama never crossed the isle or voted against his party is just lying. Senators also have some very negative things to say about McCain’s hot headedness and inabilility to compromise.

    Wallace at least got in the 95% point which was surprising. Still, I never watch or care to watch Faux Noise or any other TV news because it is all state sponsored propaganda that manages to slip some truth in by accident every great once in a while.

  • I watched these videos before I read what you said about them. Rick Davis answered the questions without any stumbling or fumbling. You seem to want to see mistakes, yet none exist.

    Now what they we’re saying may not of been truthful or correct, you may want to use that as your base argument instead of “Hey look at this guy who I don’t like, watch him squirm(Which didn’t happen). For the record I will vote for Obama.

    This site isn’t balanced, I don’t know if thats your mission statement, but Independents would probably be turned off based on your bias.

  • Davis uses the classic “there’s enough blame to go around” to try to take people’s eyes off the GOP record. Sorry, but the policies, lack of regulation, and general poor stewardship on the economy would not have occurred without the GOP. The current mess is their fault, plain and simple. Their theories and ideas were implemented, and the economy came tumblin’ down.

    I’m sure he’d also like the Dems to share in the blame on the prosecution of the Iraq War and Afghanistan, but those too are 100% GOP debacles. (Just recently McCain was STILL telling us that going into Iraq didn’t hurt our cause in Afghanistan. Moron.)

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