Friday, June 20, 2008

Sen. Burns gets the boot -- not...

Sen. Conrad Burns had been scheduled to be the keynote speaker addressing the Montana state convention on behalf of Sen. John McCain. This makes sense, since Burns is the titular head of the McCain campaign in Montana and is a former Senate colleague of McCain's.

But then we learned that Burns had been replaced:

The Montana Republican Party says the McCain campaign has replaced Burns with Rod Knutson, who spent time in Vietnamese prisoner of war camps with McCain.

The move comes a week after Burns' comments that he only reluctantly supports McCain; however, a campaign spokesman says the events were not related.


Whoops. Burns would have done well to steal a page from the Tom Coburn playbook. Coburn has a more conservative voting record than Burns did -- and yet when he campaigned on behalf of McCain, he only talked about what they had in common.

What was it that our mother's used to tell us? If you can't say something nice... That certainly applies to politicians who are endorsing other politicians.

Later, however, it was reported that Knutson was going to be speaking in addition to Burns, not instead of him. The reports must have made for some good inside baseball buzz for a while.

Does anyone want to bet, however, that when Burns speaks, he will this time give a glowing endorsement of McCain, accentuating the positive and leaving anything negative unsaid?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

It seems to me the not-ready-for-prime-time GOP folks messed this up and before it could be corrected, Associated Press reporter Matt Gouras jumped into the mess by reporting information about which he did not have all the facts. Of course, Gouras takes his cue from Mary Clare and inserted the name Abramoff in the story.
So all is happy in the AP office today… Mary Clare is saying, “Good job Matt…good job.”