One of the things we're hoping is that our president knows the names of the major world leaders he has to deal with on a daily basis. Not knowing that Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstein is the Sovereign Prince of Liechtenstein is one thing; not knowing who's running Pakistan is quite another.
At the first of the 2008 Presidential debates, it seems that McCain had a little trouble keeping the players straight without a scorecard:
Democrats picking over the remains of the debate are not only pleased to find that John McCain didn’t mention the middle class, but he had surprising number of foreign policy slips.
The one that leapt out was McCain, kinda like George Bush in 2000, getting the name of Pakistan’s president wrong. (Bush didn’t know it.)
“Now, the new president of Pakistan, Qadari (it’s actually Asif Ali Zardari), has got his hands full,” McCain said.
He also said, “I don’t think that Sen. Obama understands that there was a failed state in Pakistan when Musharraf came to power,” referring to former President Pervez Musharraf, who took power in a coup 1999. Although Pakistan sure had problems, many people didn’t regard the country, then a nuclear-armed one, as a failed state.
McCain also stumbled over pronouncing such things as Ahmadinejad and Taliban, and as we noted last night, he confused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard with Iraq’s Republican Guard, prompting Obama to make the same error.
He also seemed a bit off on his history, when he declared that Eisenhower wrote two letters before leading the Normandy invasion on D-Day, with one offering his resignation. Actually, Ike offered to accept responsibility.
The Eisenhower thing you can almost understand--as a society we often find history more useful as myth than as fact, and we frequently make allowances for that--but when these unforced errors begin to pile up, you wonder whether a candidate has the requisite knowledge to function on a day-to-day basis.
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