A lot of attention has been devoted recently to McCain's gaffes. It seems weekly, a different surrogate is poking him in the back and quietly correcting him in his ear. I'm not a huge fan of making a big deal over gaffes. Candidates have virtually every waking word recorded and much of the time they are speaking extemporaneously on a wide range of subjects. As such there are bound to be the occasional mistake, misstatement, or gaffe. However, sometimes a gaffe is not just a gaffe. And sometimes by dismissing statements as gaffes the media misses the larger story.
Generally speaking, what the media refers to as a gaffe can fall into three broad categories which are completely different, have different implications, and probably shouldn't be lumped together under the same name. The first type of gaffe is the political gaffe, this is where the candidate says what he intends to say, but that turns out to be a political mistake (think: 'nation of whiners'). It often involves a statement that too easily can be taken out of context, and causes the candidate to back pedal from a statement that they meant solely due to media "outrage". The media loves these, as they provide the perfect fodder for their endless panels of talking heads. These types of gaffes are more a reflection of the media environment than the candidate so these are not what I want to focus on. I want to take a closer look at the two types of factual error "gaffes" a candidate can make while on the trail and what they might reveal about the candidate.
The first type of factual "gaffe", I'll define as simply misspeaking. This occurs when you know the correct facts but accidentally say the wrong thing. A perfect example of this is Obama's reference to 57 states. Does anybody (intelligent) honestly believe that Obama is unaware of how many states comprise the United States of America? Of course not. Any fair observer would concede that in all likelihood Obama meant he had visited 47 states. These types of gaffe do not reveal any lack of knowledge on the speaker's part; if quizzed on the number of states in the country, Obama would definitely know the answer, and answer correctly 100% of the time. These gaffes are simply accidental slips of the tongue, and they have happened to everybody at some point in time. The media is typically fair enough to just note these stories as amusing anecdotes.
The second type of factual "gaffe" is when your statement is what you intended to say, however what you intended to say is incorrect. This is also known as being wrong. Any example of this would be (to pick on Obama again) Obama calling the town he is in by the wrong name. While it's possible that mistaking town names can fall under gaffe type number one, it's also likely at times, given the amount of traveling he's done, that some of these mistakes were errors caused by not having properly memorized the name of the town he was speaking in. If quizzed on the town's name, Obama might still have answered incorrectly. These gaffes are the result of being genuinely mistaken on a fact and they reveal a lack of deep knowledge on an subject. When these gaffes are related to less trivial issues than town names they deserve analysis and discussion by the media, it is here that the media occasionally drops the ball.
The problem is that the job of distinguishing between the two forms of "gaffes" lies with the listener. It is up to the recipient of the message to determine whether he thinks a person just slips up, or is unsure of the truth. For instance if my mother calls me by my brother's name, I'll immediately dismiss it as an accident, whereas if a new acquaintance calls me by my brother's name, I may think he wasn't paying attention during the introductions and that he is unsure of what my name actually is. In politics, the onus to make this call falls mostly on the media. They are the ones who make the determination on whether Obama gaffes and McCain gaffes are newsworthy; a mere slip of the tongue, or an indication of a lack of knowledge. One of the things that has been frustrating about McCain's gaffes, is the belief that if Obama had made them, the media would be all over him. Because the media has settled on the narrative that Obama lacks foreign policy knowledge, if he were to mix up his Sunnis and Shias, that would likely be interpreted by the press as an example of his lack of experience and used as evidence that he is unready to be president. Whereas since McCain is assumed by the media to have a wealth of foreign policy knowledge, when he repeatedly mixes up Sunnis and Shias, it is largely ignored as an accident.
To be fair to McCain, I believe a lot of his gaffes are of the slip of the tongue variety (although when someone's tongue "slips" weekly it raises other questions). I'm positive he knows Putin was the president of Russia and not Germany. I'm pretty sure he knows Iraq does not border Pakistan. I'm fairly sure he knows Czechoslovakia is no longer a country. And I'd like to think he knows that Darfur is in the Sudan and not Somalia. Spending too much time focusing on these gaffes for any purpose other than amusement strikes me as a waste of time (and the media didn't spend an inordinate amount of time on these stories). However some of McCain's other "gaffes" require more scrutiny. They seem to indicate that he's either not sure what he's talking about or he's willing to invent facts to bolster his arguments.
You cannot argue that a gaffe is a slip of the tongue when the gaffe is the main support of an argument that you're making. For instance, McCain's claim that troops were down to pre-surge levels was part of his support for the argument that the surge was successful. Because he was basing an argument on the gaffe, it cannot be dismissed as a mere misstatement. He either believed that the troops had returned to pre-surge levels or he was being disingenuous. There is no other option. This is also what's troubling about his latest gaffe regarding the timing of the surge and The Awakening. He used the "fact" that The Awakening followed the surge as evidence for the success of the surge (which he takes credit for). This also cannot be dismissed as a slip of the tongue. The statement has to be either intentionally dishonest or evidence of his lack of knowledge on the history of the war. At this point I'm unsure which possibility I think is more likely. These gaffes have not received enough attention from the media. Because they speak directly to McCain's honesty or his knowledge of the Iraq war, his supposed strong suit, they are major stories and deserve the type of coverage apparently only reserved for calling Americans bitter. If McCain's foreign policy knowledge is now in question, the Sunni Shia gaffes that were once dismissed as slip ups need to be revisited by the media, and every future foreign policy gaffe can no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.