I attended a fundraiser for McCain when he ran for the White House in 2000. It was hosted by one of his USNA classmates in his classmate's home. If felt like a sizeable crowd, but since it was a house there were probably fewer than 200 people there. Anybody who's followed McCain's career knows he was a bit of a smartass who liked to crack jokes, some of which don't go over well. This one actually did but it wasn't the humor of the joke itself that has stuck with me all these years; it's the way he told it. He set up the punchline by saying "You've all heard about the Roswell crash, right? Everbody's heard about that, right? Everybody's heard about that. Well, if you check the calendar, Al Gore [who also ran for president in 2000] was born nine months to the day after the crash. So, I'm not saying anything, but . . . " That's probably not an exact quote 20 years after the fact, but it's very close. What stuck with me was the "everybody's heard about that" part. He lowered his voice a little bit and looked down as he said it the second time. It struck me as the way someone speaks when they want to reassure themselves of something. The inference I drew in the moment 20 years ago was that he was reassuring himself that he wasn't publicly revealing classifed information and I still believe that. Just an observation I thought I'd share after someone recently posted the Barry Goldwater interview. For those who don't know, McCain was elected to the Senate seat that Goldwater vacared on his retirement from politics and of course they knew each other. Oh, and I checked. Al Gore really was born nine months after the Roswell crash.
Submitted May 26, 2020 at 10:59PM by AndHePersisted https://ift.tt/36zGjXW
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