| 30.05.2008 |
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| My colleague Michael wrote recently about the foreign policy gaffes of Barack Obama and how they feed into John McCain's strategy of emphasizing his foreign policy credentials and Obama's inexperience. But as it happens, McCain has had his share of international affairs blunders this year. They've happened farther away from the spotlight, often at moments when the protracted Democratic primary battle was particularly heated, overshadowing anything McCain did or said. The first was a series of misstatements where McCain had to correct himself for claiming multiple times that Iran was training al Qaeda operatives. That organization is Sunni, while Iran is overwhelmingly Shiite, and rarely have the two played nice with one another. McCain got hit by the Washington Post's Fact-Checker for making the claim. More recently, McCain asserted that because "the average American" thinks Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the leader of that country, he is. In fact, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is the one with authority over foreign policy. This is a little akin to Hillary Clinton's statement that she's not going to "put my lot with economists" when every economist alive criticized her plan to suspend the gas tax. Another McCain embarrassment on the foreign policy front is that a number of people working for his campaign had lobbied for repressive foreign governments, including Burma and Saudi Arabia. This one was a double hit, because not only were the actual affiliations of those campaign officials dubious, but McCain has spoken many times before about the evils of lobbyists. Several have departed, but not all of them. And the newest mistake was McCain's claim, in ridiculing Obama: "Many believe all we need to do to end the nuclear programs of hostile governments is have our president talk with leaders in Pyongyang and Tehran, as if we haven't tried talking to these governments repeatedly over the past two decades." As this writer and others were quick to point out, the U.S. policy on Iran has, for decades now, been not to talk to Tehran. (Three of the four here, notably, are about Iran.) In each of these cases, liberal groups, blogs or political organizations quickly jumped on McCain. Democrats clearly have learned from a strategy popularized by Bush's former political guru, Karl Rove: Focus the attacks on an opponent's strength, not just his weakness. Republicans attacked John Kerry in 2004 over his Vietnam War record, when Kerry's resume as a veteran was one of the things that Democrats thought would make him electable and hard to attack on defense issues. McCain has the edge in overseas-related experience, sure, but going after mistakes he makes on that front gives Democrats a chance to try and neutralize that apparent advantage. In a campaign where sensitivities about race and gender have been in the forefront, that line of attack also gives Democrats a chance to play to concerns about McCain's age by questioning whether the ravages of old age have left him confused. Republicans have implied that's Democrats' intent, anyway; so far, none of the attacks have been that explicit. The thing to watch will be whether Democrats can combine McCain's support of the Iraq War and some of the aforementioned blunders into a potent enough antidote to the problem Michael wrote about. |
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