Obama: Perpetual Gaffe Machine?

Michelle Malkin’s column today is called Barack Gaffes; The Obama machine. Michelle premise is that while one gaffe will taint a Republican for life (as examples she gives Dan Quayle’s potato and the elder George Bush’s encounter with a supermarket scanner), Barack Obama (who she calls a “perpetual gaffe machine”) gets a free ride from the media.3

Here are some of the gaffes she notes.

Last May, he claimed that tornadoes in Kansas killed a whopping 10,000 people: “In case you missed it, this week, there was a tragedy in Kansas. Ten thousand people died — an entire town destroyed.” The actual death toll: 12.

Earlier this month in Oregon, he redrew the map of the United States: “Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go.”

Explaining last week why he was trailing Hillary Clinton in Kentucky, Obama again botched basic geography: “Sen. Clinton, I think, is much better known, coming from a nearby state of Arkansas. So it’s not surprising that she would have an advantage in some of those states in the middle.” On what map is Arkansas closer to Kentucky than Illinois?

Earlier this month in Cape Girardeau, Mo., Obama showed off his knowledge of the war in Afghanistan by homing in on a lack of translators: “We only have a certain number of them, and if they are all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them in Afghanistan.” The real reason it’s “harder for us to use them” in Afghanistan: Iraqis speak Arabic or Kurdish. The Afghanis speak Pashto, Farsi, or other non-Arabic languages.

And in perhaps the most seriously troubling set of gaffes of them all, Obama told a Portland crowd over the weekend that Iran doesn’t “pose a serious threat to us” — cluelessly arguing that “tiny countries” with small defense budgets can’t do us harm — and then promptly flip-flopped the next day, claiming, “I’ve made it clear for years that the threat from Iran is grave.”

There are more in her column.

I don’t think there is a media conspiracy to cover up Obama’s gaffes and promote those of Republicans. But I do think stories that support the conventional wisdom about a politician or party get more coverage. Even before Quayle thought potato should be spelled with an “e” at the end, he was seen as someone chosen to be VP because of his good looks not his intelligence. It was easy to look at Bush, who had a definite patrician bearing and who after serving as vice-president for 8 years before becoming president, as being out of touch with the common man. It was pretty likely that he hadn’t done his own grocery shopping since some time in the 1970’s. So Bush being unfamiliar with supermarket scanners re-enforced this pre-existing view.

Barack Obama on the other hand is without question a brilliant man. After all, he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard law School and was President of the law Review. The conventional wisdom about Obama is that he is an elitist. Gaffes for which George W. Bush would be excoriated are not given the same attention when made by Obama.