Fred-based GUTMC

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TPM Reader RM gives us his GUTMC with Fred Thompson in the mix …

I’ve been saying for months that McCain has a bad case of Republican entitlement. He’s as bad as Fred Thompson was in the sense that the idea that you actually have to RUN for president – like, actually ask people to vote for you – not only befuddles but vaguely offends him. I’m sure he made his real decision to run well before the 2006 elections, and he thought it was just going to be a cakewalk.

That leads to the next facet of my GUTMC: McCain can prattle on about his supposed experience and Obama’s supposed lack, but if we’re talking about the states of their campaigns, he has no more experience running for president than Obama does – much less in fact, if you count Obama’s tough primary fight. McCain is a long-term senator, but how many big-deal speeches has he ever given on national TV? Has he ever had reporters (some of them “unfriendly”) following him around for this long? He’s used to gearing up for an hour every other week or so on Meet the Press and maybe having a few “helpful” reporters around to write down “what he meant” rather than what he said, but he was not and is not prepared to have his exact words broadcast nationwide every day.

I would speculate that it’s a generational/technological thing, but that could be interpreted as a slap at McCain’s age, and that would make McCain and Bob Schieffer cry, so it’s on the list of things you can’t say about McCain. So I have absolutely no idea why it is.

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