McCain campaign stumbles through day

Top advisers to Republican presidential candidate John McCain spent much of Tuesday with their feet in their mouths.

Their comments to reporters left openings for Democratic rival Barack Obama’s campaign to exploit throughout the day.

{mosads}Filed under campaign déjà vu, McCain senior policy adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin got the day started by saying the Arizona senator helped created the BlackBerry, a claim the Obama camp labeled “preposterous.”

Holtz-Eakin told reporters at a campaign stop in Florida that McCain’s seat on the Senate Commerce Committee was responsible for the invention of one of the most-used devices in Washington.

“If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week,” Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton said in a statement.

The McCain campaign said later that Holtz-Eakin was just making a joke.

“It was a joke by a staffer — people need to lighten up,” said McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. “John McCain heard about the comment and laughed himself. He isn’t laying claim to inventing anything — much less a BlackBerry. Our policy adviser is better with economics than comedy — clearly.”

Holtz-Eakin, according to reports, held up his BlackBerry as an example of “a miracle that John McCain helped create.”

Holtz-Eakin was explaining how McCain’s position on the committee helped him understand financial markets, using his BlackBerry as visual evidence. McCain has noted his computer illiteracy in several interviews. The GOP presidential candidate has also said he doesn’t use a BlackBerry, although his wife Cindy McCain is often spotted with one.

“Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee, so you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did,” Holtz-Eakin said, according to reports.

Democrats immediately seized on the comment, comparing it to the famous assertion in the 2000 presidential campaign that former Vice President Al Gore invented the Internet. Gore was widely mocked for the remark, but he didn’t actually make the claim. Instead, he had said he helped lay the framework for the Internet through policies he helped initiate, as pointed out by The Associated Press on Tuesday.

And later in the day, Carly Fiorina, McCain’s Victory 2008 chairwoman and the former head of Hewlett-Packard, said in an interview with a St. Louis radio station that McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, does not have the experience to be the head of a major corporation.

“Do you think [Sarah Palin] has the experience to run a major company, like Hewlett-Packard?” the host of the “McGraw-Hill Show” on KTRS asked.

{mospagebreak}“No, I don’t,” responded Fiorina. “But you know what? That’s not what she’s running for.”

Shortly after Democrats began to circulate that exchange, Fiorina supplied them with fresh material during an interview on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell.

Mitchell asked Fiorina to explain her belief that Palin could not step in as the head of a major corporation, leading to an explanation that likely had tongues wagging at Obama’s Chicago headquarters.

{mosads}“Well, I don’t think John McCain could run a major corporation,” Fiorina said. “I don’t think Barack Obama could run a major corporation. I don’t think Joe Biden could run a major corporation.”

Fiorina, on a day when all eyes were on Wall Street, went on to say that running a large company is “not the same as being the president or the vice president of the United States.”

“It is a fallacy to suggest that the country is like a company,” Fiorina said. “So of course to run a business you have to have a lifetime of experience in business. But that’s not what Sarah Palin, John McCain, Joe Biden or Barack Obama are doing.”

The Obama campaign seized on those comments to suggest that if McCain’s advisers don’t think he can run a company then he would not be a good steward of the U.S. economy.

“If John McCain’s top economic adviser doesn’t think he can run a corporation, how on earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst of a financial crisis?” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in a statement. “Apparently even the people who run his campaign agree that the economy is an issue John McCain doesn’t understand as well as he should.”

The McCain campaign did not respond to requests for clarification or comment on Fiorina’s remarks.