Now Official: No One In Tech Can Defend McCain

As readers of this blog know, after publishing the Wired Scorecard a couple weeks ago, I've been wrangling with the McCain campaign, trying to get someone to defend his tech record and platform in a debate. There are enough Obama surrogates to fill the Queen Mary and the first one I called, former FCC chair Reed Hundt, was eager and willing to find a time.

But finding a campaign surrogate for McCain was not easy.

Carly Fiorina? Alas, she was vetoed by the campaign, ostensibly because she's not a policy person; but almost certainly because she made a gaffe earlier in the election cycle. Former FCC chair Michael Powell? Supposedly traveling until election day --- and, according to one friend of his who I spoke with, wavering in his support for McCain, just as his father, Colin, did.  Meg Whitman? According to the McCain people she couldn't possibly fly east for a debate in Washington. Funny then that she spoke at a conference in Virginia earlier this week.

Finally, the McCain camp offered economic adviser Douglas Holtz-Eakin. Excellent! We started planning and everything went well. Technology has been the ignored step-child of this campaign. No issue that matters more has been discussed less. The event sold out immediately.

Then, oops, yesterday morning, a couple hours before the event began, the McCain camp emailed to say that, actually, no, sorry, Holtz-Eakin can't make it for the 12:30 debate. Apparently he had very important meetings to attend. Right. Apparently, though, he stepped out in the middle. At 1pm he was on MSNBC attacking Obama, trying to tie him to George Bush's economic policies.  Meanwhile, Reed Hundt ended up talking about complicated tech issues alone. The event was still fascinating (and you can see video here) but a huge opportunity was lost.

In short: the McCain camp chickened out. Spinning is easy; debating is hard. And defending John McCain's record on broadband deployment, spectrum issues, and net neutrality is particularly hard. "If I was voting on technology issues only, even I wouldn't support McCain," said one Republican who I interviewed while researching the scorecard.

John McCain has taken some admirable positions in his career---including some on technology issues, like H1B Visas. But this very lame back-out is just more evidence that his campaign is more interested in attacks than debates. A campaign like that deserves to lose.