Monday, January 07, 2008

On the Straight Talk Express   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

I was with a group of reporters talking with Senator McCain on his bus yesterday. A few highlights (the quotes are rough, as I didn't have my tape recorder).

I asked whether Middle Easterners might react negatively to his speculation that we could stay in Iraq for 100 years. He got a little testy. “I have never heard of an uprising of Kuwaitis, have you?”  He added, “It’s obvious what I was saying.” Namely, that the public wouldn’t mind an extended American presence if we were not sustaining many casualties. How long we would stay so long would depend on our national-security interests and our relations with the Iraqi government. Under the right circumstances, he said, we could stay “until the Earth collapses from climate change.” The words “give me a break” and “it is a phony argument” were also used. Ana Marie Cox of Time then tried to follow up, which led to more testiness.

Asked whether the Bush tax cuts—which McCain still says he was right to oppose—had helped the economy, he said, “Oh, yeah.” Asked whether he still believed that the tax cuts were too tilted to the rich, he refused to go into it. “Life’s too short.”

He commented on Senator Thompson’s proposal to use “attrition” to reduce the illegal-immigrant population. McCain allowed that it might work. “But why not address it comprehensively and then move forward? . . . Does [attrition] mean that we couldn’t have any agricultural workers come here?”

McCain also said that he and Thompson had not discussed the possibility that Thompson would drop out and endorse McCain.

01/07 08:28 AMShare