He keeps using that phrase. Do you think he's not getting invited or something?

Obviously he's saying the people who criticize Palin are "elitists".

Personally, I don't see why it's elitist to have Palin scare the hell out of someone.

Well, it's possible that the invitations never end up at the correct McCain house in time.

Of McCain but he doesn't really seem to be doing anything all that bad here. I would personally love to see him lose his temper, but at worst he seems to be getting mildly annoyed in the video and not much else. We don't need to see him snap anyway, his regular poor decisions are doing fine in sinking his campaign without any added help.

The new "liberal establishment"?

Too bad most people associate Georgetown with the Hoyas and not some ritzy neighborhood in DC.

Yeah, gotta agree with that comment. I, too am NO FAN of McCain, but all these 'testy with the media' stories are quite overblown. I see frustration in this interview, but hardly anything worth commenting on as far as anger (or even testiness) is concerned.

The most damning thing in this video is the notion that 2 out of 3 of her "experience points" according to McCain are that she was mayor of a town of 9,000 and a member of the PTA. I wish he had been up front about his requirements for a running mate from the beginning. "If you award me the nomination, I will find a running mate who has made a valuable impact on her local PTA."

There was even media speculation during the lead up to the first presidential debate last Friday night that Barack Obama would try to goad McCain into losing his temper.

I'm sure Obama knows damn well that he cannot be seen as trying to goad McCain. If he does that, it needs to be completely under the radar. A McCain meltdown would have to be seen -- at least by non-wingers -- as coming completely out of the blue.

A younger black man goading an older white man? It may not literally be suicidal these days -- in most contexts -- but it'd sure be politically suicidal.

See fivethirtyeight's Nate Silver's recent post on the lizard-y tongue flick.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/09/tongue-jut.html

"I got caught (taking candy from a drawer), gleeful excitement (look at what I just did, Mom), I got away with something (and I didn’t get caught), I did something foolish, or I am naughty."

Somehow I doubt this is "gleeful excitement".

Just to correct my previous post.

Cool, calm and concocted this candidate ain't...right? Suspect we haven't seen anything yet either. When are the "Swiftys" gonna make their appearance? Where is this supposed Rove protege strategist that lurks so near?

C'mon dial it up and the let the games begin...

I am anxiously awaiting new levels of desperation yet this week.

:-)

I don't get it. Where does McCain lose his temper? He lies and he's a little sarcastic, but I don't see where he loses his temper.

I thought there'd have been more attention to his rant about the Iranian President during the debate, which seemed to me much closer to melt-down than this interview. Maybe it was ignorable because the Ahmadinejad is so deplorable (hey-that rhymes!), but I really thought McCain lost it for a second there. It was toward the end of the exchange where McCain dreams up this pretend conversation and says something like: "What are you going to do when Ahmadinejad says I want to destroy Israel? You're going to say 'no you're not'?"

I don't know. Maybe he didn't lose his temper. Maybe he's just a dick. That's beginning to seem more likely. Someone in his campaign ought to explain to him that being a dick is a bad campaign strategy. Or is it a tactic?

The DMR endorsed him during the primaries.

The Iowans are a polite bunch, but I bet the newsrom conversation is pretty colorful right about now.

At the very least he should go Rumplestilskin on Obama the next time. It will be figgin awesome.

John, seriously? You're talking to the Des Moines Register. You're talking to a reporter from IOWA. Do you really think that person is going to a lot of Georgetown cocktail parties and picking up the latest scuttlebutt from the kind of people who go there?

This is the kind of pivoting that is so disgustingly shameless, to draw the questioner into a theoretical thirdspace wherein they are the extension of everything actually wrong with the country. Jaysus, it's like the foie gras of cognitive dissonance up in here! On the one hand the good honest real people of middle America—to paraphrase Shaviro, an entity who does not exist—don't go to those kinds of parties and they'll recognize that the Washington insiders are who really stink up the joint. On the other hand are the liberal media elites who presumably go to the same parties as conservative Washington insiders. On the third hand—to do this right you have to have three hands—this reporter from IOWA is part of both groups? Nothing in this scenario actually exists!

One week ago, John McCain said he was suspending his campaign until a deal over the bailout was reached. That deal has not been reached, yet here he is campaigning. 100 percent truth? Every single sentence, every word, every syllable, every letter going into the formation of those syllables was a lie.

Whatever John McCain may once have been, he is not that anymore. Or to borrow from one of his own pet phrases, he may have come to Washington to affect change, but Washington most certainly has absorbed him, transformed him and spit him out again, a hollow man driven by the idea somewhere back in his reptilian brain that he must... be... president. For some reason he can barely remember.

I agree with Mike Murphy; these institutions (DMR, NYT, NPR, PBS) are never going to be fair to McCain, and they are all basically working for Obama. Why give them your time?

Anyway, does it not seem pretty clear that the Des Moines register shipped its questions to Steve Innskeep? If I were asked the same exact series of questions by two reporters from newspapers or radio networks who opposed me, I think -- no, I know -- that I'd demonstrate some combativeness with them.

This may be one for the NPR Ombudswoman...