McCAIN In Mental Free-Fall! Time For His Replacement To Step Forward!
James Fenimore
"The Gaffe Patrol"
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, July 23, 2008; 8:50 AM
We interrupt the nonstop coverage of Barack Obama's overseas trip to
bring you some breaking whispers about John McCain.
He has been making a series of verbal slips -- invariably described as
"gaffes" -- that are starting to ricochet from liberal blogs to the
mainstream media. And fairly or not, some critics are suggesting the
71-year-old Republican candidate is showing his age.
McCain referred to the "Iraq/Pakistan border" in a "Good Morning
America" interview; since there is no such border he must have meant
Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has twice referred to Czechoslovakia, a
country that ceased to exist in 1993; mixed up Sunnis and Shiites; and
identified Vladimir Putin as president of Germany.
Aides to the Arizona senator dismiss the missteps as meaningless,
noting that their man is far more accessible to journalists than
Obama. "When you engage with reporters from 8:30 a.m. till 8 at night,
you're bound to make a gaffe," says McCain communications director
Jill Hazelbaker. "People are yearning for the kind of president who
takes tough questions, and that's who John McCain is."
As for the candidate's septuagenarian status, Hazelbaker says: "I'd
encourage anyone who has concerns about John McCain's age to join him
on the campaign trail. He keeps an exhausting schedule -- often
visiting two or three states a day -- answering dozens of questions
from voters and the media along the way."
With Katie Couric, Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams traveling
overseas to interview Obama this week, a debate has erupted over the
imbalance in media attention. Last week, says a Project for Excellence
in Journalism study of print and electronic coverage, Obama was a
significant or dominant factor in 83 percent of election stories, and
McCain in 52 percent. The McCain camp yesterday sent out a mocking
video compilation of pundits praising the Illinois Democrat, saying:
"The media is in love with Barack Obama. If it wasn't so serious, it
would be funny."
But there is a counter-narrative, which has taken root on the left,
that McCain is the one being treated with journalistic kid gloves. In
this view, Obama's every utterance is scrutinized while McCain, who
enjoyed warm relations with reporters during his 2000 White House
campaign, pays little for blunders.
Dan Abrams, the host of MSNBC's "Verdict," told viewers Monday that
"gaffe after gaffe after gaffe come from John McCain and they are
forgotten . . . There is no way Barack Obama would be able to get away
with something like this."
Politico catalogued the errors on its Web site yesterday, saying:
"McCain's mistakes raise a serious, if uncomfortable question: Are the
gaffes the result of his age? And what could that mean in the Oval
Office?"
The question is fair, says veteran analyst Charlie Cook of National
Journal. "People wonder if McCain is kind of like a pitcher seven or
eight years past his prime and misses a few here and there," he says.
"When you're about to turn 72, people are going to be watching to see
if you're slipping."
Of course, a 46-year-old candidate can slip as well. Obama told
reporters in Jordan yesterday that "Israel is a strong friend of
Israel's," obviously meaning to say the United States.
Still, Obama supporters are turning up the volume on what they see as
a slanted approach.
"McCain has been a media darling forever, and now he's making the
claim that he's not getting enough media coverage? It's comical," says
Mitchell Bard, a writer and filmmaker who blogs at the Huffington
Post.
"If Obama had said the things McCain has said, the media would be all
over that as an example of his inexperience: 'He doesn't even know
that Iraq and Pakistan don't share a border. He doesn't even know that
Czechoslovakia hasn't been a country for 15 years.' When John McCain
says it, it's 'Oh, that's just John McCain.' The media have decided
that McCain is a knowledgeable foreign policy expert and anything that
doesn't fit into that paradigm is just ignored."
McCain's years in the Navy and frequent visits to such war zones as
Iraq may well provide him with a degree of inoculation. Kevin Madden,
the former spokesman for Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, said it
is "much harder to make the argument that John McCain doesn't know
what he's talking about" because of his long experience in foreign
policy.
In Obama's case, Madden said, "every single misstep magnifies his
inexperience. Whereas the challenge for John McCain is that every
single misstep magnifies his age. The McCain campaign is cognizant of
that. He often defuses it very quickly with humor."
McCain's age has become a staple of late-night comedy shows, and the
candidate sometimes plays along. He said on "Saturday Night Live" that
America needs a president "who is very, very, very old." And last week
he pretended to doze off when Conan O'Brien raised the subject.
But a penchant for mangling the facts is not so easily laughed off --
at least if it becomes a theme of media coverage. Larry Sabato,
director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics, says a
critique pushed by bloggers may resonate because of concerns about
McCain's age.
"For that reason, the murmurs have become louder with each additional
error," Sabato says. But, he adds, "if any of us had a camera on us 24
hours a day, the list of mistakes would be longer than our arms."
Now, since I've got more room online than in the dead-tree version,
some excerpts that are cited above.
Politico's Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei:
"Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his
area of expertise -- foreign affairs. McCain will turn 72 the day
after Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) accepts his party's nomination for
president, calling new attention to the sensitive issue of McCain's
advanced age, three days before the start of his own convention.
"The McCain campaign says Obama has had plenty of flubs of his own,
including a reference to '57 states' and a string of misstated place
names during the primaries that Republicans gleefully sent around as
YouTubes.
"McCain aides point out that he spends much more time than Obama
talking extemporaneously, taking questions from voters and reporters.
'Being human and tripping over your tongue occasionally doesn't mean a
thing,' a top McCain official said."
Mitchell Bard at the HuffPost:
"I am so sick of hearing about how the media are biased toward Barack
Obama. It's bad enough that John McCain's campaign is making this
completely bogus claim, but now the mainstream media are reporting it
as if the slant towards Obama is a given . . .
"Nobody in the history of modern politics has been a bigger media
sweetheart than John McCain. And in this campaign, he is allowed to
virtually say or do anything without being called on it . . .
"I am not arguing that McCain's geographical aphasia is quid pro quo
proof of his foreign policy incompetence. But I am arguing that McCain
never gets called on his errors by the mainstream media (Diane Sawyer
was silent after his Iraq-Pakistan statement on Good Morning America),
where Obama would absolutely be taken to task (and probably called
inexperienced) if he made the same errors."
Mother Jones's David Corn chimes in:
"Can you imagine if Barack Obama made a similar verbal slip? The
McCain camp would declare it proof he is unfit to command. And media
commentators would howl. (Have you noticed that much of the media
coverage of Obama's overseas trip is framed this way: the trip is
fraught with risk . . . for if he makes any mistake overseas, he's
done for?)
"Yet with McCain, this is just another . . . eh, McCain moment . . .
How many passes does McCain get? I don't know."
Barely a day goes by without McCain talking about how he pushed for
the surge and Obama opposed it, which is absolutely true. But he went
a step further yesterday in New Hampshire:
"This is a clear choice that the American people have. I had the
courage and the judgment to say I would rather lose a political
campaign than lose a war. It seems to me that Obama would rather lose
a war in order to win a political campaign."
That set off Joe Klein: "This is the ninth presidential campaign I've
covered. I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party
candidate. It smacks of desperation. It renews questions about whether
McCain has the right temperament for the presidency. How sad."
The NYT picks up the story:
"Mr. McCain's advisers, who are seething about the extensive news
coverage of Mr. Obama's trip, went further in a conference call on
Tuesday when Randy Scheunemann, Mr. McCain's chief foreign policy
aide, sarcastically asked if Mr. Obama's foreign policy credentials
were based on his attendance at a junior high school in Indonesia or a
trip he took to Pakistan during spring break in college. Mr.
Scheunemann added that Mr. Obama 'seems to forget that we have
elections in this country, not coronations.'
"But at the public forum at the Opera House here, Mr. McCain also
displayed the bumpy and sometimes hapless nature of his own effort to
prove that he is the candidate with the sterling foreign policy
credentials. While he calmly fielded angry questions about his Iraq
policy from a member of the audience -- and invited her twice to
follow up as the audience booed her -- he also referred, for the third
time this month, to Czechoslovakia, a country that has not existed
since 1993 when it was split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
"This time Mr. McCain caught himself, although he was a few seconds
too late."
Jonah Goldberg says the surge argument is a political loser:
"The tragic Catch-22 for the Arizona senator is that the more the
surge succeeds, the more politically advantageous it is for Obama.
Voters don't care about the surge; they care about the war. Americans
want it to be over -- and in a way they can be proud of.
"Richard Nixon didn't win in 1968 by second-guessing LBJ about the
mess in Vietnam; he ran on getting us out with honor. McCain is great
talking about honor, but the getting-us-out part is where he gets
tongue-tied. Obama, meanwhile, talks about getting out of Iraq as
though Americans don't care about honor. That may have worked for him
in the early primaries, but it won't in the general election.
Americans don't like to lose wars . . .
"If it were going worse, McCain's Churchillian rhetoric would match
reality more. But with sectarian violence nearly gone, Al Qaeda in
Iraq almost totally routed and even Shiite Sadrist militias seemingly
neutralized, the stakes of withdrawal seem low enough for Americans to
feel comfortable voting for Obama."
Was Obama negotiating in Iraq? The reports were that he didn't raise
his withdrawal timetable with the PM in Baghdad. But Hot Air's Ed
Morrissey sees that as a technicality:
"CNN political analyst David Gergen believes that Barack Obama made a
political mistake in engaging Nouri al-Maliki on the question of the
American presence in Iraq. He stepped over the line in explicitly
admitting what amounts to negotiations with an American ally during
wartime, a role that rightly belongs to the executive under all
circumstances. Gergen calls this the first real political mistake of
Obama's trip -- but will anyone notice? . . .
"In fact, Obama's intervention violates two principles of American
politics. First, presidential candidates do not conduct foreign
policy. They can, as Gergen notes, criticize it all they want, but
they have no standing to enter negotiations."
Arianna, who hails from Greece, thinks being cheered in Europe is,
yes, a good thing:
"I understand why John McCain's campaign is desperately looking for
negatives in Obama's overseas trip. But why have so many in the media
internalized the McCain campaign's claptrap?
"Here is the McCain line on Europe, delivered via Politico by a
nameless campaign aide: 'I don't know that people in Missouri are
going to like seeing tens of thousands of Europeans screaming for The
One.'
"And here was Gloria Borger on CNN, responding to Wolf Blitzer's
assertion that Obama seemed to be on top of his game by pulling out
the Straight Talk talking points (and leaving logic and rational
thinking in a pile on the studio floor): ' . . . as the McCain
campaign points out, he can't appear to be seen as running for the
president of Europe. He's going to be really cheered in Europe, he's
going to give a huge speech. He's going to have a lot of support
there. But he's running for the president of the United States. And so
they have to walk a very, very fine line here because they don't want
to be seen having too many adoring people after him in Europe because
he's running for president of the United States.'
"What do Borger and the McCain campaign think would play better in
Missouri, Obama getting off the plane in Germany and having the locals
throw tomatoes at him? Would that endear him to the people in Middle
America -- who, in McCain World, are like an insecure girlfriend,
panicked by just the thought of someone else finding their guy
attractive?"
Joe Klein weighs in on the NYT-McCain op-ed brouhaha:
"I suppose that McCain's stubborn brittleness on this subject isn't
news. But his inability to respond to a major change in policy from
our Iraqi allies--the announcement that they can take it from here--
certainly is newsworthy. There are three possibilities:
"--McCain doesn't believe the Iraqis can take it from here. (In the
most benign reading, he may see this new position as mere domestic
political posturing on Maliki's part, which is no doubt part of the
truth.)
"--McCain doesn't want the Iraqis to take it from here. He still wants
long-term, 100 year, military bases.
"--McCain doesn't move very quickly to adapt to changing facts on the
ground.
"None of them speak very well of the guy."
The Washington Post's 12-part series on the murder of Chandra Levy is
evidence of racism--or so says a Post reporter.
The Netroots Nation convention in Texas last weekend led to a big
blunder by the Austin American-Statesman, as Editor & Publisher
reports:
When feature writer Patrick Beach "referred to the crowd as 'marauding
liberals' I knew it was not to be taken literally. But then we got
this: "-- The audience nearly staged a 'faint-in' when Gore appeared
(note use of '60s term).
"-- Pelosi is so far left her title should include '(D-Beijing).' This
would come as a surprise to many in the crowd who have criticized her
timidity -- and posed hostile questions in the Q & A. . . .
"-- Paul Krugman, as if to 'galvanize stereotypes,' wore Birkenstocks
-- but Beach throughout the article clearly needed no help in having
his own stereotypes galvanized. "-- It's shooting fish in a barrel 'to
paint liberals as overly intellectual types incapable of having fun
unless reading Noam Chomsky counts, and its sure does for them.' "
The American-Statesman has now yanked the piece online and run this
editor's note:
"Our front-page story Sunday about the Netroots Nation convention
included doses of irony and exaggeration . . . For many readers, we
failed. In trying for a humorous take on the Netroots phenomenon
without labeling it something other than a straightforward news story,
we compromised our standards."
Ouch. I'm sure the congresswoman from Beijing appreciates it.
Katie Couric, in Tel Aviv to interview Obama, talks about her CBS
tenure with Haaretz (via Politico):
"I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing
what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in
the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more
acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary's
race are important steps in the right direction."
I wonder if Katie and Hillary have talked about this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/23/AR2008072300704.html
MsFrottage
people.
THIS OUR POSSIBLE PRESIDENT?
After what Bush has put us through?
[gag!]
PiAreNotSquare
And Obama said:
"We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as
powerful, just as strong, just as well funded."
MRbluster
The main reason some polls show Obama just 6 or 8 points ahead of
McGeezer is because many whites are -- at this juncture --- afraid
that their friends and neighbors might somehow find out if they
"checked" for a black person.
But if the miserablejealousoldfuck is still the Repub candidate in
November, the Obama landslide will kick most pollsters in the
rectum!
A voting booth affords more privacy than some telephoner, who, you
never know, might know you from somewhere.