Yesterday I would not have had much to say about John McCain's confusion over whether Spain is either a U.S. ally or a European nation (he seemed to suggest the answer was neither). Clearly, as most bloggers suspected, he simply misheard or misunderstood the question.
Then came today's explanation: Yes, McCain knows Spain is in Europe. No, he does not necessarily consider it an ally.
"The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain's willingness to meet Zapatero (and id'd him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred. Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview... If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America's adversaries. It's called keeping your options open, unlike Senator Obama, who has publicly committed to meeting some of the world's worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office."
So Zapatero might (or -- to be fair! -- might not) be as bad as some of the world's worst dictators? A follow-up, if I may: If Spain is invaded, would John McCain commit America to defend it? As, you know, the NATO charter requires? Or is he going to leave that option open too? As even Joe Klein can see, "putting a chill in the relationship with one of our NATO allies simply because McCain misheard a question is going a bit far."
So the question is why the campaign chose this bizarre defense, rather than admitting McCain misheard. One possibility is that they are truly terrified of the perception that McCain is a deaf, confused old man. I don't think this incident reveals that, but it could be spun that way, and they'd rather have him perceived as an ultra-hardline neocon.
Another, or perhaps a concomitant, fear is that the campaign is aware that McCain is not actually all that strong on his supposed strong suit, foreign policy. If they were truly confident that nobody would ever think that John McCain doesn't really know who the president of Spain is and whether he's an ally, it wouldn't harm them to say he misheard. But with his history of foreign policy gaffes, they may think he's actually vulnerable on that front -- as he should be.
Update Yglesias writes:
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.
