During an interview with NBC’s Meredith Vieira on “Today” this morning, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, appearing on behalf of Sen. John McCain, didn’t exactly offer a ringing endorsement of the McCain campaign.

But when Vieira asked him — three times — whether he thought McCain was running a “dignified” campaign, Romney refused to agree:

VIEIRA: So, let me ask you, would you characterize John McCain’s campaign as dignified and honest?

ROMNEY: Well, what I’d characterize the entire campaign as is extraordinarily negative on the part of Barack Obama. […]

VIEIRA: So you think his campaign was dignified?

ROMNEY: Well, I think it’s going to come down to this, and I think that is, who is going to be able to keep America safe and who is it that’s going to add jobs. […]

VIEIRA: Governor, not to beat a dead horse here, but once again, do you believe that the campaign was dignified?

ROMNEY: Was it dignified? It was presidential.

So according to Romney, presidential and dignified are not necessarily synonymous.

Note to future campaign reporters: Please be sure to ask Romney to clarify his view on this in 2012.

Here’s the video:

Draper, who recently published in the New York TImes Magazine the definitive account of the campaign’s struggle to find a message, marks his blogging debut with an entry that unloads some of the too-hot material on the McCain-Palin rift that he collected in the course of writing the piece. A sample:

I’m sympathetic to [McCain advisers Toby] Eskew and [Nicolle] Wallace, and not just because they’re decent people. They’ve held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me — namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.”

It’s a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus. I was told that Palin chafed at being defined by her discomfiting performances in the Couric, Charlie Gibson, and Sean Hannity interviews. She wanted to get back out there and do more. Well, if you’re Eskew and Wallace, what do you say to that? Your responsibility isn’t the care and feeding of Sarah Palin’s ego; it’s the furtherance of John McCain’s quest for the presidency.

We’ll have to wait and see if Draper’s blog turns into a daily dish-fest. If it does, Draper may open himself up to criticism for dumping gasoline on a fire that already has the potential to destroy what’s left of the McCain campaign. But few reporters were granted anywhere near the access Draper had to the highest levels of the campaign, and the rest of us can be forgiven for bookmarking his blog in eager anticipation of what juicy details will come next.

(Via Politico’s Jonathan Martin)

This window into the campaign’s inner workings — how it reached the decision to “suspend the campaign” to deal with the financial crisis — is worth meditating on:

[McCain campaign strategist Steve] Schmidt in particular was a believer in these kinds of defining moments. The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

If Sen. John McCain loses next month, Draper has already explained why. If he somehow manages to pull it out, this piece will be studied for clues as to how McCain did it.

And National Review’s Rich Lowry reports that he “talked to two people in McCain world the last few days who call the whole thing ‘disgraceful’” — so you know it’s got to be good.