Is there a reason why, in its response to a voters' guide published in AARP The Magazine, the McCain campaign did not mark the bubbles agreeing with a single one of the group's eleven issue goals, even ones as innocuous as "I commit to help end gridlock by working across party lines to develop
and support common-sense, bipartisan solutions on health care and
financial security"? The Obama camp, by contrast, marked ten out of eleven. The Post's Glenn Kessler reports:
The McCain campaign did not respond to repeated inquiries over the
course of a week for an explanation about why he would not say whether
he supported or opposed various policy proposals, or whether he would
pledge to "work across party lines" on "commonsense, bipartisan
solutions."
AARP marked each failure to answer a question with an asterisk and a note: "The candidate chose not to mark a circle."
There's a PDF here.
It's hard for me to imagine any explanation for this that does not involve extreme incompetence. AARP The Magazine does, after all, call itself "the world's largest circulation magazine," with a rate base of 24 million readers--all of whom will now find in their mailboxes an advertisement for how much Barack Obama agrees with them and how little John McCain can be bothered to decide whether he does or not.
Lucky for him that retirees don't vote.
--Christopher Orr