McCain Accuses Obama of Venal Motives for Opposing Iraq War
John McCain tells supporters in New Hampshire that Barack Obama would rather lose a war than lose the presidency:
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John Cole shows his hand.
Joe Klein, amazingly, is outraged:
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.
I almost jumped out of my skin when McCain flashed that evil grin at the end. A “creepy smirk,” Joe Sudbay calls it. “He knows what he said is brutal — a brutal lie.”
Steve Benen has some thoughts on the word “gaffe.”
I’ve been listening pretty closely to McCain for quite a while, and it seems to me the bizarre things that he says fall into one of five categories:
1) A gaffe — McCain meant to say one thing, but he accidentally said something else.
2) Confusion — McCain didn’t quite know what he meant, but he talked about the subject anyway.
3) Flip-flopping — McCain knew what he meant, it’s just the opposite of what he used to mean.
4) Lying — McCain knew the truth, but chose to go in a different direction.
5) Attempted humor — McCain’s sense of comedy is consistently odd.
The piece from Allen and VandeHei pointed to a variety of McCain “gaffes,” but that seems overly-broad. For example, when McCain talks about Czechoslovakia, it was probably a gaffe — he got confused and said the wrong country name.
But when McCain said troops in Iraq were “down to pre-surge levels,” when in fact there were 20,000 more troops than when the surge began, I don’t think that’s necessarily a gaffe. It’s more likely to me he was either confused about reality, or was deliberately trying to mislead his audience about troop levels.
When McCain mistook Sunnis and Shiites, on multiple occasions, that’s not a gaffe, so much as it’s McCain not knowing what he’s talking about. Similarly, the Steelers/Packers story wasn’t a gaffe; it was McCain hoping to score cheap points in Pittsburgh by changing a story to fit the city he was in at the time.
In this sense, “gaffe” is overly forgiving. It implies that McCain means to say the right thing, but tends to misspeak. I don’t see it that way at all. “Gaffe” suggests McCain knows what he’s talking about, but is burdened by the occasional embarrassing verbal faux pas.
But that’s not the real story here. The important point is that McCain, a little too often, seems hopelessly clueless. That’s far more significant than the occasional “gaffe.”
Which is exactly what I was getting at when I wrote, at CFLF:
Here’s the bottom line about McCain’s verbal typos: People would not make so much of them if McCain’s statements on foreign policy made sense in a larger, general context. Obama sometimes misstates facts that obviously he knows, out of exhaustion (like “57 states”), but he does not make extended statements or speeches about foreign policy that are substantively and factually wrong.
And speaking of McCain’s Czechoslovakia “gaffe,” Greg Sargent has a video of McCain apologizing for the mistake — in an awkward, weirdly rambling way:
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