Dean Barnett has an excellent column in The Weekly Standard.
Obama has made a habit of coming across like a man who doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That’s bothersome enough, but what’s more worrisome still is how comfortable he is with not knowing what he’s talking about, and how convinced he seems that his rhetorical flourishes will obscure his ignorance. That strategy may work on the campaign trail, but it certainly won’t help him govern.
You add it all up, and you got a guy who despite his high cognitive abilities doesn’t know what one needs to know to be president. Jimmy Carter was also “a bright guy,” but as a president and a free-lancing ex-president, his naivete and arrogance made him a functional dunce.
Filed under: Democrats, History, Idiocy, Obama, Politics | Tagged: Democrats, Election 2008, Jimmy Carter, Obama, Obama Gaffes, Willful Ignorance
All of this because he mixed up the names of the camps? Sometimes you think one thing and say something different. This is a simple gaff and is much more easily understood than say Hillary Clinton’s “misremembering” of her trip to Bosnia.
If it were only the Auschwitz thing, I would chuckle at him for doing something stupid. Unfortunately, that’s just not all. He’s cited Kennedy’s meeting with Khrushchev as a model for speaking with Ahmadinejad, but even Kennedy acknowledge meeting with Khrushchev was a failure, and Khrushchev, to the best of my knowledge, wasn’t trying to hasten the return of the Mahdi. It’s “not knowing” that his church and its pastor are incredibly racist. It’s being seemingly unaware that some of his acquaintances are domestic terrorists. It’s his birth being inspired by a civil rights march that happened when he was 4. His 57 states and his honoring the fallen heroes present in the audience, while not necessarily showing that he’s an moron, are at least as idiotic as Quayle’s “potatoe.” It’s complaining that Arabic translators were sent to Iraq instead of Afghanistan, when Afghanis don’t speak Arabic. It’s speaking of Canada’s president, which is probably news to Canadians since they have a prime minister, and have had prime ministers for 140 years or so. It’s talking about the 10,000 people who died in Kansas tornadoes in May, 2007, when the death toll was actually 12. It’s seemingly not knowing that Illinois, which shares a border, is closer to Kentucky than Arkansas. It’s that he doesn’t seem to know that Sioux Falls and Sioux City or Sunrise and Sunshine are not interchangeable names for towns in which he’s stumping. I nearly forgot about how JFK helped his father get into the US, except, oops! he didn’t. Maybe that one’s just a lie and not so much about ignorance. I could go on, but I’m beginning to even annoy me, and I don’t know where to begin with his foreign policy statements, “misstatements,” and retractions.
First, let me acknowledge that Obama does manipulate the facts to fit his situations and this bothers me. In fact, I think he may have done this one on purpose because he figured more people would know about Auschwitz than Buchenwald. That’s actually two strikes against since that would mean he’s talking down to people. But all the candidates do these things and we just have to hope that it doesn’t carry past the election so much like it has with the current president.
Second, I’m sure that if you do a quick Google search you find a similar list of gaffs, lies, and misstatements from McCain. I’ll spare you the list I managed to find in only 5 minutes of searching.
The problem all candidates have is that they have not adapted their campaigns to the fact that they have hundreds (thousands is you count the bloggers) of people following them around recording everything they say and then combing through their entire background to find inconsistencies. Or if they do realize it they don’t have or aren’t taking the time to vet their statements.
The more I think about it, the more politics suck.
I can agree with that. You would think that knowing that you can’t screw up without the public knowing, they would at least fact check.