McCain Aide: McPeak Comments “Disturbing”

The McCain camp held another in their series of calls with bloggers this morning, this one announcing McCain’s “Service to America” tour, which will kick off next week. Ed Morrissey has a pretty comprehensive write-up of the call over at Hot Air, but the comments about Gen. McPeak (and indirectly Rev. Wright) are certainly worth putting up here. In response to my question about whether the McCain campaign had any concerns about the company Obama keeps (you’ll remember Obama made the comment that McCain has “made some bad choices about the company he keeps“), senior adviser Steve Schmidt said:

When you look at General McPeak’s comments and other comments, a lot of these comments are disturbing, the American people will focus on them. I think Barack Obama’s comments, though, are very instructive in the following sense: it is a very good example of the detachment between reality and his rhetoric. With regard to his rhetoric, he talks about a new kind of politics, but literally day after day after day, Barack Obama steps forward with inaccurate, misleading attacks, many of them character based, and he is practicing the worst of the old kind of politics. And I think over the long duration of the campaign, the American people will focus very acutely on the discrepancy between his rhetoric and his actions, should he be the nominee of the party. And of course, I think it would be a mistake for anyone to count out Hillary Clinton at this stage in the race.

So, it looks like the McCain folks are no more eager to engage on this issue than Hillary was when the story of Rev. Wright first broke. Of course, at this point Howard Wolfson would probably give a pretty colorful answer if he was asked the same question. It may be that the McCain folks won’t make hay out all this until they, too, have their backs up against the wall, at which point, like Hillary, it may already be too late–notwithstanding the encouraging words Schmidt offers her here.

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