Top Ten McCain Foreign Policy Gaffes
Steve Benen has the list:
McCain thinks the recent conflict between Russia and Georgia was “the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War.” He thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border. He believes Czechoslovakia is still a country. He’s been confused about the difference between Sudan and Somalia. He’s been confused about whether he wants more U.S. troops in Afghanistan, more NATO troops in Afghanistan, or both. He’s been confused about how many U.S. troops are in Iraq. He’s been confused about whether the U.S. can maintain a long-term presence in Iraq. He’s been confused about Iran’s relationship with al Qaeda. He’s been confused about the difference between Sunni and Shi’ia. McCain, following a recent trip to Germany, even referred to “President Putin of Germany.” All of this incoherence on his signature issue.
Steve comments, “I think an intellectually honest person would agree that if Obama had made these same mistakes he’d be labeled ‘clueless’ on foreign policy. So, why the double-standard?”
I think there are two things going on here, one fair and one unfair. One is that when you have a strong ex ante belief that someone is well-informed about a subject, you tend to overlook their mistakes as not indicative of any larger trend. And that seems like a fair procedure. If I were to say “RSS” when I meant “HTML” you’d think I misspoke — I’m a blogger, I know what HTML is and I know what RSS is. But if McCain were to do something like that, we’d say this is another example of him genuinely not understanding information technology. Nothing wrong with a double standard.
The problem is in the underlying assumption that McCain has some deep underlying national security expertise. In conventional Washington terms, expertise and credibility on security issues basically just requires you to (a) enjoy talking about security issues and (b) support starting wars. Support for launching a war that turns out well is the best thing to do (+5 cred points), but support for launching a war that doesn’t get launched is pretty good (+3 cred points), and even support for launching a war that turns out poorly is okay (+1 cred points) — the important thing is to support launching wars.
34 Responses to “Top Ten McCain Foreign Policy Gaffes”
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September 18th, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Wow; declaring his hostility to Spain doesn’t even make it onto his top ten foreign policy gaffes.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
If this becomes the story for a few days – i.e., does John McCain know his foreign policy or is he losing it? – that could be very damaging for him. There is certainly a narrative here, just like with his lying, that could be very harmful to his campaign if it catches on in the MSM. So far this weird Spain posture is only getting play on blogs. If it gets more press – more importantly, if it makes the media go back and look at past mistakes – well, Johnny Mac may blow a damn gasket.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:33 pm
This gets back to McCain’s (historical anyway) availability to the press. When you’re talking with the media daily (hourly? constantly?), their impression of your expertise is based on lots of information that’s delivered in a spontaneous, conversational manner. The assumption that you know what you’re talking about derives from their own experience. When you misspeak, they make a judgment based on that experience.
Whether the media is good at evaluating whether someone has expertise is another question, but at least there’s a rational basis for the double standard.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
Steve comments, “I think an intellectually honest person would agree that if Obama had made these same mistakes he’d be labeled ‘clueless’ on foreign policy.
I think an intellectually honest person would understand that McCain still thinks it’s 1973 and the Rooskis are gonna come and kill us all.
max
['One recalls that in 1991, a lot of the people who would later think that invading Iraq was a keen idea thought that the Soviet collapse was a fraud, designed to fool us into doing... something.']
September 18th, 2008 at 12:34 pm
It’s not just blogs, it’s showed up on the Washington Post website at least.
Think of this. It could become really easy in the next week or so for a narrative to take hold that McCain and Palin are both lying constantly, and are both profoundly confused about the most elementary facts of what are supposedly their central areas of expertise (foreign affairs and energy, respectively).
September 18th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
I think most of those, or at least some are genuine slips. He knows there’s no Czechoslovakia, that Iraq and Pakistan don’t share a border and probably a few others.
But some of those are real. In his heart of hearts, he knows Al Qaeda and Iran are working hand in glove. He let it slip out, a few times. When he says they are not working together, I bet he thinks what he’s saying is wrong, but that he has to play along with the prevailing wisdom.
September 18th, 2008 at 12:51 pm
Well, I think he just supported war with Spain, so that’s like at least +3 points, then there’s the classic war country modifier, a snooty King multiplier, global war points, and the current ally dissolution bonus. He might be pushing triple digits on this one.
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September 18th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
Seriously, where did this idea that John McCain is some sort of foreign policy guru come from? Until this election year, the thing I knew him most for was McCain-Feingold.
Sure, cheerleaders can point to the surge and how McCain backed it, but given McCain’s temperament and political outlook I think he would have been constitutionally incapable of not backing it, regardless of its value. Broken clock and all that.
But apart from that, what can anyone point to that McCain has done that demonstrates a careful, nuanced view of the international arena? Really, where did this idea (narrative?) come from?
September 18th, 2008 at 1:00 pm
i think the best approach to this issue is to stipulate from the beginning that many of these slips/gaffes/mistakes can be explained away, one way or another. Slip of the tongue, moment of confusion, didn’t hear the question, exhaustion, etc.
BUT, taken together they demonstrate a sloppiness and lack of discipline and precision, which maybe suggests a slipping away of mental faculties, or possibly reflects a larger recklessness and disregard for facts and even an attempt to deliberately confuse people (shia/sunni/al qaeda/iran). AND, a few of the “mistakes” can’t be explained away at all, starting with the most recent one about Spain.
McCain’s top foreign govt lobbyist – err, foreign policy campaign advisor – just said McCain can’t be sure whether he would meet with the leader of our NATO ally Spain! Take him at his word. McCain wants to reject our allies right out of hand at a time when we need all the help we can get. He wants to include Georgia in NATO, go to the brink with the Russians, and at the same time he wants insult Spain out of the blue and from the get-go?
This makes Bush look like a foreign policy genius in comparison.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:03 pm
But apart from that, what can anyone point to that McCain has done that demonstrates a careful, nuanced view of the international arena?
careful and nuanced are not qualifications; belligerency, saber-ratting, and advocating more war is what makes you a serious person (as Matt points out). and McCain had 52 appearances on Meet The Press to do just that.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Seriously, where did this idea that John McCain is some sort of foreign policy guru come from?
I’ll give you a hint. It involves a 6 foot by 6 foot concrete box and STFU!
September 18th, 2008 at 1:06 pm
Matthew is just listing the small stuff. How about we talk about sending President McCain to ask for another $Trillion or so from our biggest creditor to bail us out of the current Wall Street mess:
——–
1) “I hate the gooks,” McCain said yesterday in response to a question from reporters aboard his campaign bus. “I will hate them as long as I live.”
McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, was questioned about the language because of a story last month in the Nation magazine reporting his continued use of the slur. ”
Ref: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/02/18/MN32194.DTL
September 18th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Er..if we are going to ask China for a $Trillion or so, we better do it soon — MS now down 32 percent for the day.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Hell, we may even have to go to Europe and beg for money from the spics.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:17 pm
Quick clarifying question for Gov. Palin: when President McCain declares war on Spain, which side will Georgia fight on?
September 18th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Fine, but how, then, are Joe Biden and John McCain spoken of in the same breath as equal masters of foreign policy, as Biden was perceived to take away McCain’s foreign policy ‘advantage’?
How can reporters move from assessing Biden, who has blazingly clear foreign policy expertise, to McCain, who has nothing but an unwavering enthusiasm for American military power?
When was that ground ceded to McCain? Who first started trumpeting his nonexistent FP virtues?
Really, I couldn’t understand the surprise everyone was expressing when Obama declared that he would love to debate foreign policy with McCain. Hell, I’d like to debate McCain. Neoconservative ideology no longer counts for ‘expertise’ anywhere but AEI and the Vice President’s office.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I wouldn’t go quite as far as Matt on “foreign policy credibility” requiring that you “support starting wars” — since we’ve been very, very badly burned twice now in a half-century by starting ill-advised wars, that’s not nearly as popular (either in Washington or the populace in general) as it was before. (Remember all the angst about starting the Kuwait War?)
The real problem is that McCain has vast perceived credibility on foreign policy issues — not just because he was in the military, but much more because he’s been on the Senate Armed Services Committee for 21 years — and people simply find it very hard to believe that he didn’t learn a lot from that because he’s so damned lazy mentally. (When you get down to it, his ignorance IS absolutely astonishing under the circumstances — although, again, Andrew Ferguson saw it coming back in his prescient 2000 “Weekly Standard” article.) Obama had better home in relentlessly on that in the debates; the more he can make McCain stumble on foreign policy issues, the better.
(Of course, the more he can make him stumble on economic issues too, the better — but McCain’s central strength, to repeat, lies in his perceived military expertise. Meanwhile, his central weakness — besides his tendency to fumble — lies in his perceived closeness to Bush/Cheney: there was another poll out just this morning indicating that.)
September 18th, 2008 at 1:44 pm
No, no. Mentally lazy or not, military experience and having served on the Armed Services Committee have very little necessary connection with foreign policy expertise.
First, military experience itself, especially McCain’s (low level officer, spent most of the war in prison) has absolutely nothing, nothing at all to do with foreign policy on a grand scale. Zero.
Armed Services Committee…that Committee deals with, guess what, the Armed Services, not foreign relations. I can see some connections, certainly, but unless you’ve actually served on the appropriate committee or repeatedly made the effort (via bills, expressed interest, etc.) to become familiar with an issue, you can’t claim expertise. And no, one visit to Vietnam, with overtones more personal than political, does not count.
That this man is even being compared with Biden or Lugar is beyond me. I simply don’t understand where this image appeared from.
September 18th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
Unlike most of us, John McCain does, “Remember the Maine!”
September 18th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I get the analogy here, but it should be carried a bit further. If Matt were to, say, continue referring to “RSS” when he meant “HTML”, we’d come to the conclusion that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about or he’s a bit of a fool. I think this should become the new narrative: whether or not McCain really knows all that much about foreign policy, he keeps screwing it up so badly that any supposed knowledge should be nullified.
September 18th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
I’d buy into this ‘McCain actually is not the serious foreign policy guy everyone says he is’ meme more if the latest issue of the Atlantic did not feature him talking intelligently about Philip Bobbitt.
September 18th, 2008 at 10:31 pm
I fully understand the discussion of the perception of Mccain, it’s connection to his longterm relationship with the press and the justification of any apparent double standard. Conversely, however, when you combine his flips on policy, these gaffes and the decision by his handlers to keep him out of any Q&A by the national press for months on end, I’m afraid that I do have genuine concerns as to how much of the “real”mcCain is still there.
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