Reply #15: McCain's campaign is a rogue mule set loose in the desert, [View All]

starving and dehydrated and gasping for breath.

Lo how the buzzards do circle overhead.

Ok, the kid is impertinent in the question itself, which is not utterly shocking, is it? High schoolers are nothing if not occasionally impertinent.

McCain had a chance to make the kid a serious entity. Might he not have asked this kid his name, and when told, addressed him by his name, not for public relations purposes alone but because this kid is someone's son, someone's brother, grandson, nephew, neighbor, classmate.

And then might McCain not have said,

"Age happens. But age is less the point than experience. I've been a fortunate man to have lived through many different kinds of experiences -- just as you have. The number of years doesn't matter. It's the experiences we fill those years with that makes us who we are. You have the temerity to ask me a question and I have the privilege of answering you in a forum of your classmates and teachers. What we do is important, and you and I can prove that by a respectful exchange of ideas, just the two of us, or all of us here together, and finally, all of us in the country. Madison and Jefferson would have wanted us to do this. And we can do it if we're 17 or 117. It's the experience that matters. Thank you for your insight and question, because it's an essential part of the democratic process."

I think he would have won a few votes on the faculty that way, maybe several of the kids, and nobody would had to have had the word "jerk" repeated for days afterward in front of every locker in the damn school.