 What doesn't the author believe about John McCain?
On Meet the Press , Face the Nation , and Late Edition , she boasted that she had cracked "the top three." Pundits bought the three-winners line, treating Ames as a horse race ("win, place, and show") and noting that "no one's ever won the Republican nomination without finishing in the top three" at Ames. Newspapers, cramped for space, confined their headlines to Bush, Forbes, and Dole. As Fox News' Carl Cameron put it: "The other seven candidates could not crack double digits." The Boston Globe called Dole "the winner of this contest-within-the-contest." Dole touted her "victory" on every talk show and cited the Myers and Globe quotes in a press release. At a news conference, an aide introduced Dole as the straw poll's "real winner." In every TV interview, Dole claimed to have been "outspent by millions of dollars." Her spokesman told reporters that "on a dollar-per-vote basis, Elizabeth Dole trounced George Bush and Steve Forbes." Dismissive coverage of Dole before the straw poll played to her advantage, as everyone marveled at her "surprisingly" strong third. On This Week , George Will conceded, "There had been a lot of very skeptical stories about whether her people would show up. The first of these is political experience, of which Bush has little and Forbes has almost none.
 he's the only experienced political candidate in the running
 he was trying to send a message about Ames being unimportant  he had a lot of courage and cunning to skip over Ames  he's the only experienced political candidate in the running  McCain could afford to miss Ames because of his support in other states