Arnold Off Message

It's kind of odd how big a role Der Spiegel is playing in the Presidential campaign. First Nouri al-Maliki essentially endorsed Barack Obama's plan for Iraq in those pages, and now Arnold Schwarzenegger explains how he was prepared to self-censor at the Republican National Convention before the budget crisis kept him at home.

SCHWARZENEGGER: The speech I would have given is the one that Fred Thompson gave. I gave him my speech because I did not go to the convention. It was a great speech because it talked in minute detail about McCain’s torture and his being a POW, and that’s the speech that the party wanted me to give. Why? Because this way I don’t go and talk about centrist politics and maybe rub some people the wrong way. That’s another stage.

We all know that there's tight message control around these conventions, and virtually all of the speeches are written by the respective campaigns. Still, it's interesting that Mr. Post-Partisan Maverick McCain, who always puts country above party and who very rarely talks about his POW experience, was willing to go to these lengths to muzzle Arnold.

(Also, who else thinks it would've been a bad idea to have the guy you handpick to present the story of torture and prison camps do it in what amounts to a German accent?)