McCain Aide Accuses Washington Post Reporter of Writing Fiction

by DHinMI [courtesy of Daily Kos]

Yesterday the Washington Post ran a long, detailed and damning article about John McCain and his notorious temper.  The Post's own polling shows that many voters, including almost half of independents, believe that McCain's temperament would hurt his effectiveness.

McCain's longtime aide and co-author Mark Salter wrote a long email to the National Journal's Ramesh Ponnuru after even Ponnuru wrote in the conservative magazine that the article might be a problem for even conservative McCain supporters.  Salter did a couple interesting things in his email.  He tried to confuse readers by changing the subject:

... I personally know 20 or 25 Senators with much worse tempers. He argues, sometimes heatedly, with his peers, but he doesn't hold grudges or pick on people subordinate to him. If you want to tell what members of Congress have ungovernable tempers, you need only look at how rapidly their staffs turnover. As a twenty-year veteran Hill staffer, I can assure you that is the best indicator of which members have bad tempers. McCain's staff serve tenures well beyond the norm, because they are treated exceedingly well by him.

Whether someone has a temper is a complete separate issue from how they value or possibly inspire loyalty.  One could interpret Salter's ruminations on McCain's loyalty as having nothing to do with temperament, but rather with hiring people who share his goals, his vendettas, his own loyalties.  

More interesting, though, was the overall gist of Salter's email, which was to attack the credibility of the reporter:

Saw your post about the WP story on the McCain temper. If one half of it were true, it would give me pause. As it happens, the piece is 99% fiction. [Reporter Michael] Leahy is a nice guy, but the story was one of the more dishonest I've read in a while...

In sum, this is one of the more shoddy examples of journalism I've ever encountered. But for the infamous NYT story, I'd say it was the worst smear job on McCain I'd ever seen.

Politicians and their staffers seldom publicly call a journalist a hack, much less a liar.  The Bush administration is notorious for attacking journalists behind the scenes, but few people do an open attack on a journalist like Salter did.  

If Leahy is respected by his peers—and I know nothing about him, so I can't speculate—Salter's attack might play out poorly for Salter, and thus for McCain.  Journalists don't much like to be told they're biased or sloppy or dumb, but they especially hate to have someone question their honesty and integrity.  This could be a intemperate and counterproductive act by Salter.  Or maybe this is a shrewd assault by Salter to let Leahy's peers know that if they write something negative about McCain, they'll be attacked in public.  

I'd like to think Leahy's article was properly reported and that Salter will be ineffective at intimidating reporters.  Unfortunately, based on the relationship between the press and the Bush administration, I'm not optimistic.