Somebody who prefers another candidate just asked me incredulously if there really was only one question about his faltering campaign for McCain on the conference call. Well, I had missed the one by Phil Klein, and readers will forgive me for failing to transcribe the question from Serious Journalist and Former Wonkette Writer Ana Marie Cox that began, “Your campaign is something of a longshot now.”

But yeah, you look at the bloggers who asked questions on that call – Jennifer Rubin, James Joyner, Michael Goldfarb, Jim Madison, John Hinderacker, Jeff Emanuel – I can’t speak for them, but I get the feeling everybody knew that McCain’s campaign has run aground. We know McCain was going to offer the usual chin-up comments, so the focus was on what he had to say on Iraq, the pressing issue of the moment.

I can’t help but think that a similar call with the mainstream media would have been ten variations of, “We all know you’re going to lose, so why aren’t you dropping out?”

Finally, there was interesting overlap in terms of tone and goals with Tony Snow’s conference call with bloggers.