New McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt on the US Attorney firings scandal: It was “mostly a combination of nonsense and politics and provides us no concern at all.”

Schmidt hired key firing scandal figure Tim Griffin after his resignation.

Together at last! Karen Hughes and Mark Penn join forces to create a crisis team. Interestingly, they plan on helping clients out of crisis — not getting them into it. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

We’ll be covering the Attorney General’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning over at TPMmuckraker. He is there for a general oversight hearing, so not necessarily expecting there to be fireworks on the stories near and dear to our hearts, like the politicization of his department, torture, and the like, although those are expected to come up.

Ironically, any knocking around of Mukasey by committee Democrats will be interrupted later this morning so that they can go do his bidding on the FISA bill, which faces a final vote and is expected to easily pass. We’ll be covering that, too.

McCain and that trademark wit, this time taking a question about U.S. cigarette exports to Iran and turning it into another “Bomb Iran” moment:

People say a lot of things about Social Security — a lot of it nonsense. But I haven’t heard something like this in a long time. John McCain says that Social Security, as originally conceived more than 70 years ago, is an “absolute disgrace.”

McCain told a townhall in Denver on Monday, “Americans have got to understand that. Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that’s a disgrace. It’s an absolute disgrace and it’s got to be fixed.”

It’s really a disgrace? That’s how the system was designed to operate. And it’s served as financial bedrock of retirement security in this country for going on a century.

Late Update: Here’s the video…

How does the AP treat the McCain joke about U.S. cigarette exports helping kill Iranians? Take a gander.

Over at TPMCafe, Reed Hundt and Todd Gitlin decry McCain’s statement on Social Security–and the big question for both is why is it not getting any press?

Efforts to strip telecom immunity from the FISA bill just failed in the Senate. Not even close.

Late Update: The other two immunity-limiting amendments went down, too.

Today we’re trying to put together a unified theory of John McCain’s speech-making crappiness.

My initial theory was that if you look at the most outstanding instances of McCain’s awkward, cringe-inducing delivery they’re chiefly about domestic issues — economy and culture war stuff — that McCain doesn’t really care about. When he’s talking about the thing he’s jazzed up about — being right about the surge — his delivery is much more straightforward. A lot of this stuff is also packaged as attacks on Obama, as Ben pointed out.

But then David pointed out that the thing that really comes through to him about McCain’s delivery is a sense of entitlement. ‘I’m a Senator and I’m John McCain so just get on with it and make me president.”

Sort of like he’s not disciplined enough to learn to deliver his prefab lines or convincingly pretend he believes or cares about them. I hadn’t thought about it quite like this before. But this has the ring of truth to me. And perhaps the two meld together. McCain is big on Iraq and wants to talk about that. But the other stuff is mainly stuff he’s changed positions on anyway and doesn’t particularly care about. So he just goes through the motions.

Part of the reason may be that, despite a few of his claims to the contrary of late, I don’t think McCain has had many contested races in his political career. I don’t know exactly how his first election to the House went. But since he’s been in, it’s been pretty much smooth sailing. So a lot of this is just new to him.

This brings us back to the question of why McCain seems to suck so much this cycle whereas many people — even political opponents — thought he was solid as a candidate in 2000. And when I say ‘solid’, I mean a candidate whose public presentation was a big part of his attraction.

Inevitably, one part of the explanation is age. A lot happens between 63 and 72. But we also forget that much of the punch of McCain’s candidacy was his anger at key segments of the conservative establishment that attacked him for not toeing the line on issues important to the religious right and on tax policy. That was his punch. That got his goat up. But most of his snark lines this season are meant to kow-tow to those same folks. And in any case, his manner seems to say, why am I up here having to do this anyway? I’m John McCain. Who’s Barack Obama? Just make me president!

In any case, we’re still looking for the grand unified theory. So your thoughts are most welcome.

TPM Reader KB on the Grand Unified Theory of McCain Crappiness (GUTMC — ‘Gutmuck’) …

I don’t think it’s any great mystery. Two things to keep in mind about McCain. One is that he was built for the New Hampshire primary of small groups, town halls, shaking hands and back-slapping on the media caravan. He simply does not fill the grand stage set-pieces of a general election. It seems to swallow him up. He does not paint in large graceful strokes the way Obama does. He is a pointillist. Second, if you recall the 2000 race, McCain was focused on fighting special interests, pork, and money in politics. National security was not a huge part of that primary conversation. His shtick was radically altered by 9/11, and it makes him a less appealing candidate, less happy-go-lucky, more conventional.

On the other hand, TPM Reader CB has a more 2008-specific analysis …

I think that you guys are on the right track with your theory about McCain’s poor stumping skills. In this cycle, he’s done so much pandering to try to win every interest group that he has lost any sense of conviction in what he believes in, outside of the need to stay in Iraq. That shows in his nervous laughter at his own jokes, his inability to really sell applause lines (and his getting caught off-guard when people applaud at other points), and his general lack of clarity about the terminology and specifics of his own proposals. The best speech I’ve seen him deliver this term was the one about how life is going to be in the victorious year of 2013, which he delivered with more conviction than he’s been able to give to telling us how we’re gonna get there.

He’s caught in a bind in that he needs to pander to his base to keep them from not showing up, but he also needs to reach out to independents, and the only way to do that is to be as vague as possible and promise as much as he can. That’s a tough sell, and the flop sweat is showing.