Photo: Courtesy of ABC
Well, the View ladies made good on their word. During John McCain’s visit to the show, they asked him the questions they said they would ask and kept him on his toes. When he strolled onto the stage, McCain gave everybody a hug (except Sherri, who was out today), then made fun of Barack Obama for fidgeting when he was on the show last week. “Whoopi, you shouldn’t have gotten all dressed up,” he cracked to the comedienne, who was wearing jeans and a loose shirt. So funny! So comfortable! He went on to give some boilerplate answers to their questions, with a joke here and there.
• “For nearly four years this war was mishandled and mishandled badly,” he said about Iraq, in response to a barrage of questions. “I detest war. Nobody hates war more than those who have been in them.”
• Walters asked what success is, in this situation. ” Success is a reduction in U.S. casualties, including the end of U.S. casualties,” McCain said. “That’s the end of a war.”
• When Whoopi asked about whether he would attend the opening ceremony of this Olympics if he was president, he said, “It depends.” “Unless they change something quickly,” he explained later, “I would not go.”
• Elisabeth Hasselbeck limited her slobbering all over him to one moment of praise about his ability to handle Iraq but did ask him some thoughtful questions about his war rhetoric.
• McCain also knocked Barack Obama’s bowling score. When asked how he bowled usually, he replied: “I think a little better than 37.”
• “You hired Karl Rove to be one of your campaign advisers,” Behar said, while asking whether he was going to be just like Bush. “That’s like hiring Mike Tyson to be your bodyguard!” McCain said that positions of his that are different from Bush’s include ones on “the conduct of the war for four years, spending, and climate change.”
• Hasselbeck asked about the improbable story that New Yorkers would prefer a Rice-McCain ticket over a Clinton-Obama one. Will he pick Condi as a running mate? “She’s a great American,” the senator hedged. “We’re not really in that process yet.”
• On his reluctance to release his health reports, he offered: “We’re going to do it next month.”
• On the possibility of a draft: “No, I don’t think so. I think our all-volunteer force works.”
• On not voting in support of making MLK Jr. Day a national holiday: “It was about the cost of having another holiday.” He went on to spin the question to his unimpeachable record as a veteran: “I learned of Martin Luther King’s assassination when I was living alone in a prison cell in Vietnam.” His guards, he said, “viewed it as a great blow to our morale, and it was.”
