Chris Wallace played the sickening Bill Ayers robo calls and insists he will continue the political strategies that he said he would never use. Wallace even brought up a Bill O'Reilly clip of him saying his campaign would not be about Ayers, but about issues that are so important to this great country.
WALLACE: But Senator, back — if I may, back in 2000 when you were the target of robo calls, you called these hate calls and you said...
MCCAIN: They worked.
WALLACE: ... and you said the following, "I promise you, I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic."
Now you've hired the same guy who did the robo calls against you to — reportedly, to do the robo calls against Obama and the Republican Senator Susan Collins, the co-chair of your campaign in Maine, has asked you to stop the robo calls. Will you do that?
MCCAIN: Of course not.
McCain only hates things when they are targeted at him. These robo calls are vital to his campaign and are all he has left. We know the kind of man he is when his back is against the wall and he turns to the Lee Atwater politics of personal destruction. John McCain employs his usual tactic of filibustering Wallace whenever he brought up a tough question for him and said that he would not even listen to Rep. Susan Collins, who asked McCain to stop using those horrible robo calls.
LA Times:
Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, facing a tough reelection fight, urged GOP presidential contender John McCain on Friday to stop making automated calls into her state linking Democratic nominee Barack Obama to a 1960s radical.
"These kind of tactics have no place in Maine politics," said Collins' spokesman, Kevin Kelley. "Sen. Collins urges the McCain campaign to stop these calls immediately.
Even the odious Norm Coleman asks them to stop. McCain, have you no decency?
Sen. Norm Coleman (R-MN), who called for pulling all of his negative advertising Oct. 10 (though the NRSC was running anti-Franken ads), has called now for all "attack ads and phones calls" to be pulled across the country, including robo-calls paid for by the Republican National Committee. "It's time for all of these attacks to end," Coleman said, per a release, during his Obama-sounding "Hope Express Tour."
Full FNS Transcript:
NARRATOR: You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayres, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans.
(END AUDIO CLIP)
WALLACE: Senator, back in 2000...
MCCAIN: That is absolutely true.
WALLACE: Can I ask the question?
MCCAIN: No, no. But before you do, that is absolutely true. And I don't care about Mr. Ayres, and old — and his wife, who was on the top 10 most wanted list. I care about everybody knowing the relationship between the two of them. That's legitimate.
Senator Obama and Bill Ayres served on a board of the Woods Foundation and they gave $230,000 to ACORN. What's that all about? He said that he was just a guy in the neighborhood.
He wasn't just a guy in the neighborhood. We know — we need to know the full extent of that relationship. That is an accurate robo call.
WALLACE: But Senator, back — if I may, back in 2000 when you were the target of robo calls, you called these hate calls and you said...
MCCAIN: They worked.
WALLACE: ... and you said the following, "I promise you, I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic."
Now you've hired the same guy who did the robo calls against you to — reportedly, to do the robo calls against Obama and the Republican Senator Susan Collins, the co-chair of your campaign in Maine, has asked you to stop the robo calls. Will you do that?
MCCAIN: Of course not. These are legitimate and truthful, and they are far different than the phone calls that were made about my family and about certain aspects that — things that this is — this is dramatically different, and either you haven't — didn't see those things in 2000...
WALLACE: No, I saw them.
MCCAIN: ... or you don't know the difference between that and what is a legitimate issue, and that is Senator Obama being truthful with the American people.
But let me tell you what else I think you should be talking about and the American people should be talking about. In the debate the other night, I asked Senator Obama to repudiate a statement made by John Lewis, a man I admire and respect and have written about, that connected me and Sarah Palin...
WALLACE: This is the congressman and civil rights leader.
MCCAIN: Civil rights leader, American hero — that connected me and Sarah Palin to segregationists, to the campaign of George Wallace, and even alluded to the bombing of a church where four children — four children — were killed. And I asked him to repudiate that statement.
I have repudiated every statement made by any fringe person in the Republican Party. And it has come up from time to time, and it probably will. The fact that Senator Obama would not repudiate that statement, I think, is something the American people will make a judgment about.
That robo call is accurate — is totally accurate. And there is no comparison between it and the things that were done and said in South Carolina.
WALLACE: I want to ask you about William Ayres. Last may, Bill O'Reilly asked you about Ayres and also about Reverend Jeremiah Wright. And here's what you had to say. Let's watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
MCCAIN: This campaign is not going to be about — in all due respect, about Reverend Wright or Mr. Ayres. It's going to be about vision. It's going to be about a plan of action, for the American people are hurting right now.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: But, Senator...
MCCAIN: And that's exactly — and that's exactly what the campaign is about.
WALLACE: Senator, let me ask the question.
MCCAIN: Yeah, sure.
WALLACE: But, Senator, according to a New York Times poll this week — and let's put it up on the screen — there you can see it — 62 percent of independents now think you're spending more time attacking Obama than explaining what you would do as president.
Haven't you gone on the attack against Ayres because you're behind?
MCCAIN: Facts are stubborn things. Senator Obama has spent more money on attack ads against me than any campaign in history.
