John McCain the jokester -- Gawker wonders if it will it hurt him
We all remember John McCain's "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran" mini-aria, and many of us have caught McCain during his late-night talk show appearances. He can be funny (though the laughs at his reworking the Beach Boys' "Barbara Ann" were far fewer than he may have anticipated). But can comedy kill the campaign?
Gawker has a piece (which includes some language inappropriate for this blog and which we want to warn readers about) on McCain's sense of humor and parallels to Ronald Reagan. It concludes McCain is no Gipper.
What strikes us as interesting is the issue of timing the piece raises. McCain made his "bomb Iran" joke more than a year ago -- before before his spectacular political collapse and resurrection. In many ways, McCain got a pass then. There was some backlash from people who likely wouldn't support McCain anyway, but the feeling was his campaign was moribund anyway, and the mini-flap quickly faded.
But what would happen if McCain cracked that joke now? Would that kind of stumble derail him? Or would it just further separate the pro-war from the antiwar votes?
Politics -- it's all in the timing.
-- Scott Martelle
Andrew Malcolm's immigrant parents repeatedly stressed the importance of active participation in a democracy. Early lessons included learning the alphabetical list of states by watching televised roll calls of national political conventions. That childhood exposure led to a lifelong fascination with politics, including 40-plus years of covering them and a brief stint practicing them as press secretary to Laura Bush in 1999-2000. A veteran foreign and national correspondent, Malcolm served on the Times Editorial Board and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2004. He is the author of 10 nonfiction books and father of four.
Johanna Neuman is a veteran Washington correspondent for both The Los Angeles Times and USA Today, having covered presidents and politics as far back as Ronald Reagan. A former president of the White House Correspondents Assn., she authored a book on media and foreign policy, “Lights, Camera, Wars.” Most recently she was co-author of the 
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McCain gas a goos sense of humor and he will need all of the sense of humor to put up with all the attacks that will be thrown his way.
VJ Machiavelli
http://www.vjmachiavelli.blogspot.com
Posted by: VJ Machiavelli | June 30, 2008 at 08:16 PM