Ambinder's got some plausible context for McCain's demeaning, seemingly out-of-nowhere "that one" jab at Obama last night:
McCain uses "that one" frequently in his stump speeches; the set-up is usually clearer, as McCain refers to Obama's being one of the senators who supported it, not McCain -- as in, if you had to guess who supported the Bush-Cheney '05 energy bill, it's that senator, not this senator. But it came off awkwardly on stage tonight.Reading that, I think I do remember hearing McCain use that parallel in a setpiece speech. And it wasn't even McCain's most awkward line of the evening. When asked whom he'd appoint as U.S. Treasury secretary, McCain sneered "Not you" at Tom Brokaw as if he were saying "Screw you."
But let's not overthink this! There's plenty of room for McCain to be both awkward and contemptible in the way he talks to and about his opponents. (And wife.) I know that if I were sitting down on a public stage and my colleague and rival were standing above me with a mic, condescending to me as an object, I might recognize this as a badly delivered line, but I would still want to kick him in the thorax. Beutler: "Somebody needs to mention that this is a singular rendering of the phrase 'Those people!'"
Posted by Kriston at October 8, 2008 12:36 PM