"Straight Talk" from John McCain


During the Repub presidential debate on January 24, 2008 in Boca Raton Florida, Tim Russert asked "is it a problem for your campaign that the economy is now the most important issue, one that, by your own acknowledgement, you are not well versed on?Senator McCain responded, "actually, I don't know where you got that quote from. I'm very well versed in economics."

Unfortunately, Russert didn't have the Senator's quotes at hand then but here he is three days later during McCain's appearance on Meet the Press:

I will show you where I got the quote from. I got it from John McCain, and here it is. "McCain is refreshingly blunt when he tells me I'm going to be honest, I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated." Wall Street Journal, November 26th, 2005. You repeated it to the Boston Globe in December of '07. You said it.

Russert (or his producer) deserves credit for digging the quote up. However, perhaps McCain didn't actually lie in the first sentence- maybe he didn't in fact know where the NBC Washington Bureau Chief had gotten the quote. But he certainly does know he isn't very well versed in economics.