Before you click, you ought to know that this runs a little under 68 minutes. It's a live interview and "town hall" meeting that John McCain did last Friday at the headquarters of Google up in Northern California. The questions are a little out of the ordinary, which is good, and it's a much more interesting chat than you'd get if McCain was just being interviewed by a Chris Matthews or Larry King.
There are some good comments in there, though I think McCain gets (and takes) too much credit for "straight talk," especially when he seems to be so fervently back-pedalling from certain past positions that might now cost him votes among the so-called Religious Right. He's asked about reconciling his once calling Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" with his willingness to go to Falwell's university, speak and be photographed alongside the man. McCain responds that he met with Falwell and they settled their differences…
…to which a lot of us have to say, "Huh?" Jerry Falwell is the same person he always was, saying the same things, pushing the same agenda. If he was an "agent of intolerance" then, he's an "agent of intolerance" now. I don't think McCain is saying that a private conversation convinced him that he was wrong about Falwell, is he? So what changed?
Shortly after that, an audience questioner asks McCain a multi-part question about atheism. McCain gives him a quick, semi-responsive answer — that a McCain administration would never fault people for whatever they believed — and moves on a bit too rapidly. He also gives a pretty disingenuous (I think) reply to a fair question about who's "won" the Iraq War if we've lost. Frankly, I think it poisons the whole public debate about the Iraq War to try and reduce it to a matter of winning and losing.
Your reaction to this video may differ from mine but mine was that I liked McCain for the first part of it…up until around the third or fourth audience question when he struck me as getting fitfully evasive and more apt to give glib dismissals of tough queries. He also seemed a bit too interested in showing the audience how funny he could be. Anyway, it's a revealing discussion and you might want to take the time to watch some or all of it. Thanks to Tom Galloway, who was somewhere there in the audience, for letting me know about it.