{"id":14979,"date":"2008-03-22T12:05:40","date_gmt":"2008-03-22T16:05:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/14979.html"},"modified":"2008-03-22T12:05:40","modified_gmt":"2008-03-22T16:05:40","slug":"mccains-gerald-ford-moment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/mccains-gerald-ford-moment\/","title":{"rendered":"McCain’s Gerald Ford Moment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen some reporters give John McCain some pretty foolish passes before, but this<\/a> is just irritating.<\/p>\n

During the March 20 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, while discussing Sen. John McCain’s admittedly false claim on March 18 that “[i]t’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran and is receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran,” MSNBC senior campaign correspondent Tucker Carlson asserted, “This is ridiculous. He misspoke.”<\/p>\n

After host Chris Matthews asked, “Did he do it on purpose? Did he conflate on purpose, like the terrorists with 9-11 and Iraq?” USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page asserted, “I think it’s a verbal error. And, you know, most Americans can’t tell you the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, either.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

First, as we’ve all heard plenty of times by now, McCain didn’t “misspeak” or commit a “verbal error.” He publicly repeated the same bogus line, over and over again, until eventually apologizing after Joe Lieberman corrected him. If you screw up once, it’s a gaffe. If you make the same mistake four times in three weeks, it’s actual confusion.<\/p>\n

But for the Washington bureau chief of a major newspaper to dismiss this because “most Americans can’t tell you the difference between Sunnis and Shiites, either,” is just painful. McCain has been in Congress for a quarter-century and he’s now close to becoming the commander in chief in the midst of two wars in the Middle East. Having a clue about al Qaeda’s and Iran’s sectarian backgrounds isn’t too much to ask.<\/p>\n

Susan Page is right, most Americans probably can’t tell you which is which, and wouldn’t have picked up on McCain’s mistake without help from knowledgeable reporters. But therein lies the rub: most Americans aren’t running for president<\/i>. The fact that a presidential candidate is just as confused about the Middle East as the typical Joe isn’t a good thing<\/i>.
\n
\nCQ’s estimable Jeff Stein, who has done some fine work<\/a> highlighting the confusion of public officials on Sunni\/Shiite issues, noted yesterday<\/a> that McCain appears “divorced from reality,” and the senator’s claims about al Qaeda are both “absurd” and “backwards.”<\/p>\n

But more importantly, Stein thinks they sounded kind of familiar.<\/p>\n

To some, the Republican candidate’s strange behavior was a replay of that historic 1976 campaign gaffe, when President Gerald R. Ford declared that Poland was “independent and autonomous” from the Soviet Union. Millions of Poles found that surprising.<\/p>\n

Ford had a chance to regroup, but he passed it up. He insisted that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.” <\/p>\n

You could still hear the guffaws at the polling booth…. Gerald Ford never recovered from his Polish moment, and lost to former Georgia Gov. and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Believe me, I’d love nothing more than for McCain’s screw-up to be as consequential as Ford’s, but it’s highly unlikely. As Stein conceded, “Ford stumbled at the climax of both campaigns, when millions of Americans were riveted to the television debate. In contrast, McCain’s moment occurred far away, and involved issues too complicated for most Americans to understand, not to mention members of Congress and national security officials themselves.”<\/p>\n

Quite right. I’d add just one thing: the press lambasted Ford for being a sitting president, in the midst of the Cold War, being this confused about Soviet influence in Eastern Europe during a nationally televised debate. In contrast, journalists are prepared to give McCain a get-out-of-embarrassment-free card, and justify his ignorance by a) telling Americans he simply “misspoke” when he clearly did not; and b) arguing that Americans don’t know the difference anyway.<\/p>\n

If Ford caught this kind of break from the national media, he would have likely won a second term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve seen some reporters give John McCain some pretty foolish passes before, but this is just irritating. During the March 20 edition of MSNBC’s Hardball, while discussing Sen. John McCain’s admittedly false claim on March 18 that “[i]t’s common knowledge and has been reported in the media that Al Qaeda is going back into Iran […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14979\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}