KEY POINTS:
NEW YORK - Dana Perino, 35 is a diminutive blonde who ten years ago decided her public relations career in California was going nowhere. So she crossed America on a bus and arrived in Washington DC, jobless. These days she speaks for the leader of free world from a podium in the White House that had to be lowered to fit her 155cm frame.
Despite her trajectory to White House spokesman, Perino - understandably - sometimes shows her frustrations. On Saturday she sent out an email advising White House correspondents and that President and Mrs Bush had exercised their right to vote early ahead of next week's Presidential election. After she got numerous emails and calls asking whom the President and First Lady had voted for, Perino, shot out a snippy reply.. The subject header was, "I find this hard to believe." And her email said: "But so many reporters have asked just who the president voted for, I guess I have to make it clear. For months the president has said he supports John McCain for president and of course he voted for him."
Perhaps Perino should not have found the reporters' questions so hard to believe. For John McCain, a Republican like Bush, is doing a marvellous impersonation of a Democrat as he desperately tries to show America that he is no lackey of the deeply unpopular George Bush. Bitten by a flurry of advertisements that contain old sound and pictures of him buttering up to Bush , McCain late last week reinvented himself. Aboard his campaign jet - its logo is The Straight Talk Express - he unleashed his most pointed attack yet upon the President. McCain told a Washington Times reporter: "We just let things get completely out of hand," he said of his own party's rule in the past eight years. He lambasted Bush for building mountains of debt, failing to boost the health system and abusing executive powers. "Those are just some of them," he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich.
His remarks can been seen as a measure of just how much damage Democrat ads running on national television showing McCain's earlier effusive praise for Bush are doing. In one ad McCain is shown boasting that he has supported Bush 90 per cent of the time.
It all made for a very uncomfortable appearance for McCain yesterday on the Meet the Press program which played footage of McCain saying in 2005: "And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I have been totally in agreement and support of President Bush."
Looking flustered, McCain yesterday told the program's host: "I know how it is on this show. You show various segments and comments that we make thousands of. And I understand it. But the fact is that I am not George Bush."
He now has only a week to prove it.
