Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei have an interesting item in the Politico today that’s generating quite a bit of attention, about John McCain’s series of verbal “gaffes.”
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said “Iraq” on Monday when he apparently meant “Afghanistan”, adding to a string of mixed-up word choices that is giving ammunition to the opposition.
Just in the past three weeks, McCain has also mistaken “Somalia” for “Sudan,” and even football’s Green Bay Packers for the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs.
Allen and VandeHei tread carefully in considering why McCain keeps making these mistakes, suggesting that they might be “the result of his age,” though this is an “uncomfortable question.”
Michael Crowley added, “Given the nature of our political-media culture works, this sort of narrative could be more damaging to McCain than anything the prime minister of Iraq has to say. The perception of McCain as a doddering old guy could easily become on a par with the perception of Al Gore as a serial exaggerator.”
Like John Cole, I look at the question about McCain’s age as largely irrelevant. I care that McCain is wrong, not that he’s wrong and nearly 72. When considering McCain’s near-constant confusion, the only relevant angle is McCain’s breathtaking incompetence — the fact that he’s a septuagenarian doesn’t much matter at all.
I was struck, though, by the use of the word “gaffe” in the article.
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.”