Monday, September 22, 2008

more on McCain camp's whining

A campaign of whiners (in addition to liars)

Steve Schmidt is the Karl Rove deputy who is now John McCain's whiner in chief (aka he's one of the top TOP guys on the campaign). Schmidt held a conference call today to whine to reporters that they'd better stop calling John McCain a liar. Only problem? Most of what Schmidt told reporters during that call was, uh, a lie. Don't take it from me. Take it from Ben Smith at Politico:

Sen. John McCain’s top campaign aides convened a conference call today to complain of being called “liars.” They pressed the media to scrutinize specific elements of Sen. Barack Obama’s record.

But the call was so rife with simple, often inexplicable misstatements of fact that it may have had the opposite effect: to deepen the perception, dangerous to McCain, that he and his aides have little regard for factual accuracy.

The errors in McCain strategist Steve Schmidt’s charges against Obama and Sen. Joe Biden were particularly notable because they seemed unnecessary. Schmidt repeatedly gilded the lily: He exaggerated the Biden family's already problematic ties to the credit card industry; Obama’s embarrassing relationship with a 1960s radical; and an Obama supporter’s over-the-top attack on Sarah Palin when — in each case — the truth would have been damaging enough.

“Any time the Obama campaign is criticized at any level, the critics are immediately derided as liars,” Schmidt told reporters. But as he went on to list a series of stories he thought reporters should be writing about Obama and Biden, in almost every instance he got the details wrong.


(Americablog)