Now John McCain won’t commit to meet with me...
In McCain’s bizarre interview with Spanish owned Union Radio he refused to say whether he would meet with Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. Listening to the interview repeatedly, it simply seemed that McCain had no idea who Zapatero actually was. McCain seemed to think he was a Latin American autocrat - despite the reporter repeatedly saying "I am talking about Spain." This gaffe would seem to have very significant implications.
To be fair, I didn’t have Zapatero’s name at the top of my head either, although I would have memorized it before talking with a Spanish owned radio station. See Max Bergmann over at Democracy Arsenal for a detailed write-up.
McCain won’t meet with a NATO ally, that has nearly 1,000 troops in Afghanistan, that has lost more than 20 soldiers there, has been brutally attacked by Al Qaeda, is incredibly influential in Latin America, has the seventh largest economy in the world, is a DEMOCRACY, and is a large and influential country in the EU. Won’t meet with them?
Initially this was probably just a gaffe, but his campaign is standing by it (see here for the clip). The other explanation is that McCain is still angry that Spain pulled out of Iraq. Yglesias also links to a list of the top 10 McCain foreign policy gaffes and tries to explain why he is treated as credible on foreign policy:
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.
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