This video of McCain squirming awkwardly as he tries to square his past votes against mandating that health insurers cover birth control with his surrogate's position that women feel it unfair when insurers cover Viagra but not contraception has been making the rounds:
McCain seems uncomfortable, yes, but nothing on the clip is particularly damning. Rather, the reminder of what an awful candidate McCain is comes at the clip's close. The CNN anchor says that the McCain campaign did release a comment saying "the Senator from Arizona supports competition in the health care industry." Useless, non-responsive boilerplate. But the sort of useless, non-responsive boilerplate that McCain wasn't adroit enough to come up with on the spot, because he's not fluent in the mechanics and themes of his health care proposal, and so not flexible enough to apply them to unexpected circumstances and questions. So he looks around for a joke, can't find one, looks around for an opinion, can't summon one, and finally punts the question to his communications department. That tactic was a mundane bit of political cowardice: The question is a simple one, and anyone as legendarily free-wheeling as McCain could summon a reply. McCain, however, didn't want to offer an off-the-cuff reply, but wasn't able to gracefully deflect or stall, either. And that's part of the campaign's current problem: McCain can't be a constantly-shifting, endlessly improvising maverick and expect to hold his base and win the election. But he's not very good at being a traditional politician, either. So he just comes off as inept.
