Wednesday, April 02, 2008

BARACK OBAMA, JOHN MCCAIN

The '100 Years' Comment, Destined To Be Misquoted and Taken Out of Context

The McCain camp is a bit irked with this Boston Globe article, for it's "he said, she said" take on whether Obama is mischaracterizing McCain's "100 years" comment.

The Columbia Journalism Review — not exactly a member of the vast right wing conspiracy — says that there isn't much to debate, that Obama is clearly taking McCain's remark out of context.

To be fair, the ABC News piece does provide the quote in its full context, giving enough information to allow conscientious readers to figure out the truth. That’s better than the L.A. Times piece, which says only that “McCain has stressed since then that he meant that U.S. troops might need to remain to support Iraqi forces, not to wage full-scale warfare”—instead of simply telling readers that it’s clear from the context that McCain did indeed mean that. Still, neither piece stated high up and unequivocally that Obama is distorting McCain’s words.

To be clear, if Obama wants to take issue with McCain’s willingness to keep U.S. troops in Iraq for a hundred years in any capacity, that’s obviously his right. But that’s not the same as misleading voters about what McCain is proposing,

This matters. Obama has given every indication that his general election strategy on Iraq and foreign policy will be to portray McCain as dangerously bellicose. If he’s going to do so by distorting McCain’s words, the press should forcefully call him out on it each time.

The full quote, at the time:

Questioner: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years…

McCain: Maybe a hundred. Make it one hundred. We’ve been in South Korea, we’ve been in Japan for sixty years. We’ve been in South Korea for fifty years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed. Then it’s fine with me. I would hope it would be fine with you if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where Al Qaeda is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.

In light of that, it seems pretty clear that yes, Democrats are trying to put words in McCain's mouth. On the other hand, are we really surprised? 

04/02 09:14 AMShare