Blogger Conference Call summary...

Today, Senator McCain completed his first blogger conference call in May (and first call with a nearly presumptive general election opponent). The call lasted roughly 30 minutes and he took about 7 questions from bloggers. The highlights:

• He recapped his brilliant general election speech from earlier today on a vision of where America will stand at the end of President McCain's first term in office in 2012/January 2013, including: "We will have won in Iraq" by the Iraqi military standing up, all American troops will generally be out of harm's way and we will have a Korea-style security arrangement with the elected government.

• Further in Iraq, he said "the surge is working", and by the end of the year 2008 the surge will have definitively worked.

• He said "America is fed up with partisanship" and he promised to sit down, across all party and ideological lines and focus on "what's doable in America" and getting things done pragmatically. In that vein, he promised to appoint Democrats to important posts in his Administration.

• In response to a question about Lebanon and Iran, he said Iran is substantially responsible for what Hezbollah is doing. In response to a question about Sen. Obama promising to sit down without preconditions with Ahmedinejad of Iran he said "I'd ask Sen. Obama, what does he plan to talk about with Ahmedinejad when he sits down with him?" Sen. McCain reminded the listeners that Ahmedinejad had, just this week, referred to Israel as "a stinking corpse", and has promised to "wipe them off the map". Sen. McCain said he would not talk to Ahmedinejad until he retracted those statements and until the Iranians made binding and verifiable promises to stop development of nuclear weapons. Finally, he stated that it is "naive to talk about sitting down with Iran" without preconditions.

• Sen. McCain promised, as President, that he would have bi-weekly conference calls with bloggers. ED NOTE: If this happens, I may have to continue to blog after the election!

• In response to a question about his environmental and energy plans, he promised to pursue all clean alternatives, including specifically mentioning: Nuclear, Plug-in Hybrids and Clean Coal. He also said he's in favor of government support for "pure" R&D, and said our labs are the best in the world and a greater national resource.

Hope you enjoyed the recap. Please let me know if you have suggestions on questions I should ask in the next conference call...