WASHINGTON — In mid-February, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., went on the NBC program “Meet the Press” to explain his unhappiness with President Barack Obama’s nominee for defense secretary. A week later, he took to “State of the Union” on CNN to chat about sequestration (bad) and the attack in Benghazi (worse).
In May, he was on “Fox News Sunday,” talking Middle East politics with Chris Wallace. Last week, McCain, in California for his oldest son’s wedding, hit “Face the Nation” on CBS, via satellite, to discuss his trip to Syria.
McCain is not his party’s most recent presidential nominee. He is no longer the highest-ranking Republican on any major congressional committee. And as party spokesmen go, these days he is just as often speaking against congressional Republicans as with them.
Yet on many given Sundays — over 60 of them since 2010 — McCain repairs to a television studio in Washington to hold forth. On “Face the Nation” alone, McCain has appeared more than any politician in the program’s 60-year history.
His Sunday ubiquity has set off some grumbling in Washington that producers give him too much airtime. It also tends to solidify the impression in living rooms across America that he remains the spokesman for, and titular head of, his party.
“Really?” McCain asked with a soupçon of glee when informed of his record-breaking Sunday showiness. “Well, I enjoy them. I find it is the best way to communicate with the American people.”
In many ways, the Sunday morning talk shows are like ID lanyards and BlackBerrys. While much of the nation has lost interest in them, they hold a big — some would say disproportionate — sway in Washington.
The programs’ producers and members of Congress — and, to some degree, White House officials — collaborate in a weekly seduction ritual in which producers try mightily to get the most powerful guests and newsmakers of the moment, as the guests’ staffs weigh the risks of stepping before some of the toughest questioners in Washington.
When it comes to a dream guest, program hosts say, McCain checks almost every box: a senior Republican senator who can speak authoritatively and contemporaneously on many issues, flies secretly to Syria, compares members of his own party to deranged fowl and yet is a reliable opponent of most Obama administration policies.
“What makes a good guest is someone who makes news,” said Wallace, the Fox News host. “To make news, you have to be at the center of the news and willing to talk about it in a noncanned way, someone who always comes to the shows ready to play.”
Critics of the Sunday programs argue that the words spoken on them are at once too calculated and overly interpreted, simply by virtue of where they are delivered.
“There is a tendency on the Sunday shows to look more toward partisan polarization,” said David Gergen, a senior analyst for CNN who has advised four presidents, and himself a frequent Sunday guest. “They seek out people who are further out on the spectrum.”
