Does John McCain need talking points?

Posted By Blake Hounshell Friday, July 18, 2008 - 1:26 PM Share

Marc Ambinder, writing about today's fascinating Elizabeth Bumiller story on the Obama foreign-policy team, observes:

The McCain response to all this -- John doesn't need daily talking points -- is a reflection on Obama's learning curve, although McCain is also very clearly learning as he is going, too.

Matt Yglesias complains:

It's true that, in some sense, McCain doesn't need daily talking points. But the reason he doesn't need daily talking points isn't that he can talk about national security issues with fluency and skill without them. Lacking daily talking points, he's repeatedly confused Sunni and Shiite, repeatedly forgotten that Czechoslovakia doesn't exist, changed his position on Afghanistan twice in 24 hours, etc. In short, he's made a ton of gaffes just as you would expect from an underprepared candidate. But he's allowed to get away with a lack of adequate preparation because, in the mind of the press, his years in captivity decades ago are adequate demonstration that he understands national security issues even though there's no real basis for that view.

Please. McCain doesn't need an advisor to inform him that the Czech Republic and Slovakia are separate nations. He knows this; he just misspoke (twice). Ditto for the Sunni/Shiite stuff. It happens when you age. And "the press," of course, isn't letting McCain get away with anything -- just how did we find out about all this? Maybe CzechoslovakiaGate and these other gaffes have failed to light up the cable networks simply because they aren't really a big deal.

EXPLORE:DECISION '08, U.S. FOREIGN POLICY
 

JUNGLEBEATBILL

12:45 PM ET

July 18, 2008

Just Misspoke?

I disagree. Allow yourself to imagine Obama committing similar gaffes. He would be chided for his inexperience, chastised for not understanding foreign policy, probably even called a Sunni or Shiite sympathizer. You are right that McCain's time as a POW is his get out of gaffe-jail free card, and that's total BS. What does that prove? The truth is McCain is out of touch. I believe it was on this very blog I read that the man doesn't have email and never uses a computer. How could he really be in touch?
 

CIGRAINGER

1:13 PM ET

July 18, 2008

exactly.

He needs to learn how to work Wikipedia. I think the bottom line here is that if McCain isn't comfortable enough in his knowledge of the Islamic world to get Sunnis and Shiites straight when he's talking from the seat of his pants, he does not belong in the White House. It's not asking a lot of a candidate to have a cursory knowledge of world affairs, and it is a sad sign of our expectations in the office of the President that this is considered 'not really a big deal'.
 

TEODORO

2:28 PM ET

July 18, 2008

It's a matter of relative confidence

Maybe so. But in November it will come down to one or the other and it won't matter who has more gaffes. It will matter who has the MOST experience and in whom the American people have the MOST confidence.
 

CIGRAINGER

3:27 PM ET

July 18, 2008

In the end it will be less

In the end it will be less the former than the latter. Most Americans don't know enough about foreign policy and can't actually tell which has most experience or better policy (two issues that matter, experience is only one side of the coin). The issue is perception, and you're absolutely right that voter confidence will make or break a candidate. The problem here is that voter confidence for the vast majority of people is dictated by the 'news' media, which is why their marketing of Obama gaffes as indicators of his inexperience becomes problematic in comparison to their treatment of McCain's gaffes as insignificant in regard to his foreign policy knowledge.
 

CIGRAINGER

12:48 PM ET

July 18, 2008

Hmmm

I agree with you to an extent, Blake. However, a point I think Yglesias was trying to make and is oh-so-true is that had Obama made these same gaffes, the media would say it was due to his inexperience. And he is correct in observing that the media is far kinder towards McCain when it comes to foreign policy even though he clearly lacks knowledge or competent advising in that area.

I suppose my issue with what you said comes down to this: Does the media EVER ignore something simply because it isn't really a big deal? That seems to be the media's job as of late: finding ridiculously insignificant issues and blabbing on about them until they become big deals in the minds of average voters.

This is especially an issue in the media's treatment of Barack Obama. I'm not particularly an Obama fan (although I do find him the better alternative to McCain) but I, and I think Matt Yglesias, think ignoring McCain's foreign policy gaffes (which come in droves) makes the media coverage one-sided and decidedly unfair. Obama is perceived as the weaker of the two in foreign policy right now, specifically because of the 'news' media jumping all over every little unimportant little gaffe. He has to work hard, he has to have daily talking points, he has to have 300 advisers to combat the false perception that he is weak on foreign policy knowedge. McCain does not. Why?
 

BLAKE HOUNSHELL

1:50 PM ET

July 18, 2008

I think you are getting things backwards

The media is extremely market-driven. The sad truth is that the market for "gaffe" or $400 haircut stories is much greater than the market for stories about real issues. The media is just giving the public what it clearly wants. That's why Drudge and Politico rule the news cycle. Rather than ignoring McCain's gaffes, the media has just seen that they haven't really caught on and is just following the market. And they reason they haven't caught on is the context -- (a) they just aren't a big deal and (b) very few people think they actually reveal much about John McCain's foreign-policy knowledge. The more saleable critique of McCain, in my view, is that he's a neocon, not that he is uninformed.
 

CIGRAINGER

3:34 PM ET

July 18, 2008

Fair enough. I guess that's

Fair enough. I guess that's why I don't watch TV news or read most newspapers anymore. I kind of stick to this and a few other blogs, FT, BBC, and the Economist.

I do, however, still think he's uninformed along with being a neocon and find both to be valid (if not saleable) critiques. Informed people don't mix up Sunni and Shiite without correcting themselves, same with the Czechoslovakia comments. Candidates who have a hand in their own policy don't switch them up when they don't have talking points, as McCain has done on Afghanistan. I feel like he's just a face for the neoconservative machine and doesn't actually take part in his policy planning. I think the most telling example of this is when he was asked about whether condoms reduce the risk of the transmission of HIV. His response wasn't 'yes', which is the scientifically factual and obvious answer; it was 'I know I have a position on this, but I'm not sure what it is, let me ask one of my handlers' (obviously paraphrased).
 

NQUIXOTE

2:56 PM ET

July 18, 2008

So he's not willfully ignorant, he's just borderline senile?

So it's bad for a president to be incoherent at foreign policy because he's stubborn, but OK for him to be incoherent because he's old? The Czechoslovakia thing is a pretty unimportant gaffe; the Sunni/Shiite thing is slightly more worrying (since Bush administration policymakers have tended to conflate the two in practice!). But the changing positions on things like Afghanistan are a big deal. I have to agree with Yglesias; they're a bigger deal than the press has yet admitted.
 

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