Getting Ahead of the Gotcha Game

Gotcha.

Chatting with reporters aboard his campaign plane yesterday afternoon, Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama sought to burnish his foreign policy cred in advance of upcoming trips to Iraq, Afghanistan, Britain, France, Germany, Israel and Jordan. But with a single slip of the tongue, he may have seriously damaged his White House bid instead. The gaffe came in the midst of a conversation about how he'd apply a compassionate yet realpolitik approach to Darfur. "

Oh, wait. Nevermind. My bad. It was, in fact, John McCain who confused Somalia and Sudan yesterday afternoon--on the eve of his trip to Columbia and Mexico--and John McCain who mistakenly (and repeatedly) suggested back in March that the Iranians, who are Shiite Muslims, are training operatives for Al Qaeda, which is Sunni. Earlier this year, it was McCain's Independent ally Joe Lieberman whispering in his ear; yesterday, it was Mark Salter, an aide. What's more, the only people who've bothered to link the two gaffes are liberal bloggers. Beyond Eilperin's initial report, the MSM hasn't even mentioned it.

That the scenario above is plausible for Obama but not McCain highlights one of the key dynamics of the 2008 presidential race--and points at a major danger for the Democratic nominee going forward.

There are two absurdities worth noting here. First, saying "Somalia" instead of "Sudan" isn't remotely newsworthy. These people are running for president. They publicly utter a tens of thousands of words every year. They should be allowed (occasionally) to get a syllable wrong--and they'd shouldn't be accused of ignorance every time they do. Of course, this isn't how our relentless media culture works. As I've written before, the Internet has blessed us with

That leads to absurdity number two. As I've noted above, McCain got off scot-free here. In a vacuum, that's the proper response. The problem is that the media would've obsessed over a similar slip by Obama--radio, Drudge, MSNBC, the whole nine yards. That double standard is sort of hard to stomach. Liberals like to say that the press is biased in favor of McCain, but that's far too simplistic an analysis. Instead, the MSM is actually biased in favor of facile narratives. The McCain storyline says he's strong on foreign policy and experienced enough to be president. Apparently, that impression is powerful enough--check out the latest polls--to withstand a contradictory verbal gaffe (or two, as it were). But 54 percent of Americans believe, rightly or wrongly, that Obama lacks the experience to be an effective president, so a Sudalia of his own would be seen as substantiating those doubts. In that case, the gaffe-obsessed pundits would surely pounce, and Obama, in the words of the New York Times' John Harwood, "would likely pay a higher and more enduring price for a comparable flub"--i.e., a flub that's just as irrelevant as the one we're currently ignoring.