McCain: "I Screwed Up."

Letterman never rolls over for his guests but he has learned to be respectful and ask fair questions. He wasn't always like that. And every once in a while, when necessary, he can snap. Remember O'Reilly's appearance?

McCain's appearance was a fair encounter. He tried the stump speech lines. Healthy smatterings of applause. He made a few jokes. Some laughs. He explained his last cancellation as a clear mistake. I screwed up he said. Was he admitting that it was a campaign stunt? Or was he just patronizing Dave? Either way it was a little uncomfortable there for about a minute. The line got its laugh and applause. But it was probably more from agreement than amusement.

The meat of the interview came towards the end when Letterman decided to question McCain's ingenuousness in choosing the push the Ayers connection.

A two-fold challenge:
Is serving on a board the same as palling around? It's a thin connection and Letterman called McCain on it. Are they double-dating? Are they going to dinner? What are they doing? Are they driving cross-country? He made the point that Obama's connection to Bill Ayers should be no more damning that McCain's connection to G. Gordon Liddy. Letterman pressed, You will also admit that we cannot really control who we interact with in our lives a hundred percent.

He pushed another challenge that I hadn't heard yet. Palin said terrorists but they only named one. When asked why she made the accusation in the plural McCain had to resort to a There's millions of words said in the campaign. C'mon now. C'mon, there's millions of words. There's millions of words. So… we shouldn't listen?

It came through pretty clearly that Letterman wasn't buying McCain's lines. Especially on the preparedness of Sarah Palin. He probably could have moved in on some of those issues with specific challenges like he had on the Ayers lines. Because that's really an issue. I don't judge McCain if he really is afraid of Ayers. But if he isn't afraid of Palin being president I can only imagine it's because he knows that could only mean that he no longer has to worry about anything. And that's really selfish.