White House spokesman Josh Earnest praised predecessor Jay Carney’s first-night performance as a CNN contributor Wednesday night after he and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., got into an intense verbal exchange over the President Obama’s policies in Iraq.
“I think he acquitted himself quite well,” Earnest said.
Earnest calmly characterized the spat as a rehashing of the 2008 campaign when Obama and McCain expressed very different views about how best to handle U.S. policy in Iraq.
“The differences in the strategies they were advocating were extensively litigated in the 2008 election,” he said, referring to Obama’s victory at the ballot box against McCain that November. “… The American people spoke very clearly.”
He was quick to express “extraordinary respect” for McCain’s service to the country and “the sacrifice he has made for our nation’s safety and security.”
While CNN’s Anderson Cooper stood back and listened, McCain and Carney repeatedly disputed each other’s arguments, cutting each other off before finishing sentences in a bruising round Wednesday night after Obama’s speech on confronting the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
Several times over the course of about 10 minutes, McCain accused Carney, while serving as White House press secretary, of bragging about Obama’s decision to send every last U.S. serviceman home from Iraq — a policy McCain said is responsible for the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq.
Carney countered that the Iraqi government didn’t want any U.S. troops to remain, an assertion that set off McCain, who said he had talked to Iraqi government officials at the time when the decisions were being made and they told him they desperately wanted a residual level of U.S. troops to remain.
McCain also hit Carney for failing to arm the Syrian rebels for nearly two years, a decision he said Obama opposed even when the rest of his national security team was pushing for it.
