{"id":16318,"date":"2008-07-22T13:50:43","date_gmt":"2008-07-22T17:50:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/16283.html"},"modified":"2008-07-22T13:50:43","modified_gmt":"2008-07-22T17:50:43","slug":"john-mccain-gaffe-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/john-mccain-gaffe-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"John McCain, gaffe machine?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei have an interesting item<\/a> in the Politico today that’s generating quite a bit of attention<\/a>, about John McCain’s series of verbal “gaffes.”<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Just in the past three weeks, McCain has also mistaken “Somalia” for “Sudan,” and even football’s Green Bay Packers for the Pittsburgh Steelers.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the errors have been concentrated in what should be his area of expertise: foreign affairs.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

Michael Crowley added<\/a>, “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.”<\/p>\n

Like John Cole<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

I was struck, though, by the use of the word “gaffe” in the article.
\n
\nI’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:<\/p>\n

1) A gaffe — McCain meant to say one thing, but he accidentally said something else.<\/p>\n

2) Confusion — McCain didn’t quite know what he meant, but he talked about the subject anyway.<\/p>\n

3) Flip-flopping — McCain knew what he meant, it’s just the opposite of what he used to mean.<\/p>\n

4) Lying — McCain knew the truth, but chose to go in a different direction.<\/p>\n

5) Attempted humor — McCain’s sense of comedy is consistently odd.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But that’s not the real story here. The important point is that McCain, a little too often<\/a>, seems hopelessly clueless. That’s far more significant than the occasional “gaffe.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. […]<\/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-16318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16318","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=16318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}