Gaffes

As Barack Obama was making his fairytale trip through Europe and the Middle East last week, John McCain was flirting once again with the other extreme of political life: the gaffe. Below is an adumbrated list of a few things McCain (and his surrogates) have said in the last couple weeks (for a few more, go here):

- Confused the chronology of the "surge" and the Anbar Awakening (as discussed in the Keith Olbermann clip in Ruxton's last post).
- Campaign co-chairman Phil Gramm called our current economic woes a "mental recession" and Americans "whiners."
- Referred to Czechoslovakia, a country that hasn't existed since the early 90s.
- Talked about the (nonexistent) border between Afghanistan and Iraq.

I've always thought that many so-called gaffes get way more press than they deserve. When you're talking publicly all day long and every word that comes out of your mouth is put under the microscope, it's impossible not to occasionally say something you don't mean (Bosnian sniper fire) or bungle a thought in a way that can be politically exploited ("I voted for it before I voted against it"; Bittergate). A gaffe, in this sense, is merely a slip of the tongue, a fleeting moment of mental or verbal fatigue/laziness. It is a higher order of gaffe that actually demonstrates a misreading of reality, and I believe that this is the species of gaffe we're talking about with McCain. I really wouldn't care at all if the GOP candidate confused Sunnis and Shiites, Lieberman stepped in to correct him, and that was that; what genuinely concerns me is the fact that McCain repeated this embarrassing misunderstanding again and again. Same with some of the other issues above. What this demonstrates is less a propensity for verbal slips and more of a failure of understanding.

Some people tried to wish away the Sunni/Shiite confusion as simply a "senior moment" back in March. But when a political candidate, surrounded as they are by an army of advisers, makes the same mistake twice, three times - this is a problem. Obama, of course, has had his fair share of gaffes too, but they've been quickly corrected. They were, then, in the truest sense, gaffes. McCain is troubling because the recent spate of faulty testimony is more than simply a list of gaffes: it is evidence that he might not really know what he's talking about.

This video is only slightly off-topic, but it deserves a place here: