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You are being very selective in your choice of quotes. If you read the entire interview, you will see that McClellan went out of his way to avoid singling out the SwftVets group, refused to call for them to stop the ad, and instead, kept pointing out that the Dems have been doing this for months. Basically, he said, "We'll only stop if you do." This is exactly the right tone - distancing themselves from the ad itself, which is necessary to keep the ad from being portrayed as a Bush trick, while not denouncing the content of the ad or the group.
And this is another reason why I'm here on FR: There's lots of people to help out with keepeing the prespective on things.
Thanks, Folks. It gets rough, nowadays.
The White House distanced itself from the anti-Kerry ad, but declined to condemn it.
I think McClellan would have been smarter to play it dumb, viz.:
Q Do you -- does the President repudiate this 527 ad that calls Kerry a liar on Vietnam?
MR. MCCLELLAN: I'm sorry, which ad was this, and where did you see it? What did it present exactly?
Q: It was played on TV in six key swing states. Several veterans who served with Kerry repudiated Kerry's relating of events during his Vietnam service. (Etc.)
MR. MCCLELLAN: I've been very busy. Is this important or relevant to the campaign? Why is it important?
Q: It is important because as I am sure you know, Kerry has made a great deal in his campaign about his military service in Vietnam.
MR. MCCLELLAN: You know, the President and his entire White House staff has been very busy this week dealing with the recently uncovered terrorist threats to selected financial targets. (etc.) I'm sorry but I do not have enough information at this point to be able to comment. Can you tell me more about what the veterans said, and what their background is? What gives their story enough credibility that you would bring it up now? Why is this important? Are you absolutely sure that they are Vietnam veterans and that they served with Kerry?
Q: Well, the veterans said they served with Kerry. So far we have been unable to find any evidence that they are not who they say they are. And the video uses an introductory line by Edwards that states that anyone can just spend 3 minutes with veterans who served with Kerry to verify Kerry's account... (etc.)
MR. MCCLELLAN: So let me get this straight... the problem is between Mr. Edwards and the Vietnam vets, and the White House and Bush were never mentioned? (etc.)
IOW-- (well, the strategy as illustrated above I think speaks for itself; I'm not arguing here for blanket "non-responsive responses" of the Nixon era. But if CBS and the rest of the MSM dishes it out, they should be required to eat it up as well. I agree with those calling for better handling by the WH on this. Those questions could have and should have been seen coming from a thousand yards away IMHO...)
Now, why did McCain intervene? According to CBS, it was because McCain had been slimed by Bush in 2000 and held a grudge:
In 2000, Mr. Bush's supporters sponsored a rumor campaign against McCain in the South Carolina primary, helping Mr. Bush win the primary and the nomination. McCain's supporters have never forgiven the Bush team.
(Notice how the bad feelings are not attributed to McCain himself. But he lashes out anyway against Republicans later in the CBS article...) Here's McCain's bona fides according to CBS:
McCain himself spent more than five years in a Vietnam prisoner of war camp. A bona fide war hero, McCain, like Kerry, used his war record as the foundation of his presidential campaign.
I wonder what gives CBS or any other "news" organization the right to declare any soldier a "bona fide war hero," much less someone like McCain [!?], whose full actual military record I believe has been questioned by many in public. (I notice the CBS article did not concern itself with *those* details, though...)
If one reads the rest of the the CBS article, it is covered with McCain statements either professing ignorance of certain aspects of the situation, or deploring that the White House would stoop to such a low (after professing his ignorance that they would do so). For a Republican, McCain seems to go very far out of his way to give CBS the sound bites they would have needed to maximize a negative spin on the event, and not just report on the event itself.
Also, by calling McCain and not any of the other veterans a "bona fide war hero," CBS seems to have attempted to cast aspersions on the veterans who put out the ads, as if their records were somehow questionable... without doing so explicitly.
This was the first article I could find on cbsnews.com which dealt with the Swift veterans "attack" on Kerry. IOW, CBS came out with a slanted piece against Bush right out of the front gate, with virtually no information or even hint of investigation into whether the actual allegations were true or false (what is the first rule of journalism these days? One imagines that it's changed somehow from who-what-where-when to spin-spin-spin-spin).
A political veteran such as (presumeably) McClellan should have realized the likelihood that MSM such as CBS would take his benign condemnation of all negative campaigning and weave it into an anti-Bush editorial masquerading as a news article.
And if the Republicans are serious about their cause, they should excommunicate McCain from the Republican party immediately for remarks such as these. By his actions, McCain doesn't even seem to be pretending to be a conservative (though it's also true he seems to have been acting this way for several years now). Still, having McCain serve as seemingly nothing more than a convenient and timely mouthpiece for whatever the MSM reporters can't come out and say directly on a topical political issue seems just a bit over the top... imho...
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But when you look at the real words, I say, AOK....GWB can't embrace them, but he didn't hurt them in any way, and neither did Brit.