John McCain's Cell Phone Privileges Have Been Curtailed

He wants to be leader of the Free World. But he is not even allowed to use his own cell-phone whenever he wants to. Which BTW is Gold Colored.

We are not talking about some delusional teenager, living in his mom's basement. It is John McCain who lost his ability to chat up his buddies at will. Who has the power to do this to a grown man? NYTimes

Mr. Schmidt has sought to cut down on Mr. McCain’s use of his cellphone and limit the people who have regular access to Mr. McCain in an effort to keep him more focused, advisers said. He has been the impetus for an effort by Mr. McCain to limit sharply his engagements with reporters, the kind of freewheeling encounters that Mr. McCain enjoys — and that helped him charm the news media for years — but that often lead him to veer from his campaign’s message of the day.

So when is Schmidt going to ground McCain? Or take away his gameboy? Now we can see why McCain comes across as a teen bully lashing out at the successful kid in his class. His own people treat him as a juvenile.

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Except once in a while McCain sneaks something past them. His own small effort at rebellion at his masters. They were ridiculing Obama for saying that proper tire pressure helps with gas mileage. Even distributing tire gauges (at 25 times the original price) marked "Obama's Energy Plan". And McCain went ahead and admitted publicly that Obama was right.

Senator Obama a couple of days ago said that we ought to all inflate our tires, and I don’t disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it.

And the campaign had to issue a `clarification'.

Someone in Mr. McCain’s entourage — typically Nicolle Wallace, a Schmidt ally and a veteran of Mr. Bush’s 2004 campaign and White House who recently joined the campaign as a traveling senior adviser — is given the responsibility of making sure Mr. McCain agrees to the message and tries to stick to it.

"Now there is a management structure," Ms. Wallace said. "It is formally headed by Steve and Rick. This is one of the things that has been improved."

She is talking about managing McCain. Usually the campaign managers work for the candidate. Here, instead, the campaign has a person whose responsibility is to make sure that the candidate agrees to the campaign's message. So this is the guy who wants to run the country?

There is more

Mr. McCain is known to sign off on big campaign decisions and then to march off his own reservation. Two weeks ago, he publicly disagreed with his own spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, after she used a line of attack against Senator Barack Obama that he had approved after careful strategizing within his campaign. Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain’s calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama’s foreign trip fell apart.

McCain does not speak for the McCain campaign. Precious.

UPDATE: Here is a diary that explains what exactly happened.

So, why is the McCain campaign releasing this kind of information in an otherwise complimentary article in the NYTimes? Are they trying to have it both ways? Let it be known that the negative ads are not really McCain's handiwork. That he just went along with Karl Rove/Steve Schmidt tactics.

Here is one thing I want from the next President. He should be managing his staff. Not have his staff manage him. How the hell is McCain supposed to run the country if he needs permission to make a phone call?

Remember Reagan during the Iran-Contra scandal? In hindsight it seems likely that the Alzheimer's had started to kick in. Reagan seemed genuinely baffled at the shenanigans that Lt. Col. North was pulling off in the White House basement. We don't want a repetition of that.

Original here