The mysterious credibility McCain has ‘in the bank’

Last week’s biggest campaign screw-up came when John McCain, on at least four separate occasions, claimed that al Qaeda terrorists have traveled to Iran, received support, and then re-entered Iraq to fight U.S. forces. Obviously, that’s false. The good news is, the Sunday morning shows were kind enough to mention the embarrassing incident. The bad news is, what the various pundits said about the episode.

On “Meet the Press,” for example, Tim Russert asked NBC political director Chuck Todd if McCain’s confusion about Middle Eastern basics will “hurt a McCain candidacy.” Todd’s response was interesting.

For those who can’t watch clips online, here’s what Todd said:

“Well, what’s odd about the, the stumble is that it — is it a stumble or was it, or was it that this talking point that he’d been, that he’d been using for actually a couple weeks or over a week, where he was talking about sort of almost blurring that the, the enemy of al-Qaeda and the enemy of the, the Shia-trained Iranians and sort of blurring them as one enemy. And the, the question is, did he just sort of — he truncated it to the point where he ended up misspeaking. “The, the problem, of course, McCain has is that he can’t, you know, he doesn’t want to make it so that he, he forgot it for a minute. You know, he’s — because of the age issue, he can’t ever look like he’s having a senior moment. So instead, he’s better off going ahead and saying, you know, ‘OK, so he misspoke.’ Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, ‘Oh, he says he’s Mr. Experience. Doesn’t he know the difference between this stuff?’ He’s got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it. “I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it’d have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem for a couple of days for them.”

I think this analysis is largely right — though I don’t know why Todd kept insisting that McCain “misspoke” after conceding that the senator made the same mistake repeatedly — but I was especially struck by his reference to the credibility McCain has “in the bank.”



This isn’t to say Todd’s wrong. He didn’t say McCain had earned this credibility, or even deserves it, but rather that the media is simply willing to give McCain the benefit of the doubt. The senator can screw up the basics, over and over again, and reporters will just assume, “McCain knows what he’s talking about, so must not have meant what he said.”

I suspect it’s the same problem that exists with McCain and the unhinged, right-wing TV preachers he’s embraced during his campaign. I get the sense that reporters give him a pass based on a faulty assumption: “McCain isn’t really a crazed evangelical bigot, so he must not agree with these nutty televangelists.”

I’m fairly certain this isn’t going to happen, but a skeptical, independent press corps that takes its responsibilities seriously may want to consider why it’s so quick to make these assumptions. Indeed, ideally reporters wouldn’t make any assumptions at all about what McCain “knows” and “believes.”

What’s more, the problem was apparent beyond just “Meet the Press.”

The Washington Post’s George Will asserted that Sen. John McCain’s admittedly false claim that Iran is training Al Qaeda is “[n]ot damaging at all” to McCain, “because people say it’s a given that this man knows what he’s talking about.” Similarly, The Chicago Tribune’s Jill Zuckman asserted that “I don’t think many people believe” “the argument that McCain doesn’t know what he’s talking about when it comes to foreign policy.” But neither Will nor Zuckman noted that McCain has made that error more than once.

It’s not only maddening, it’s the kind of negligent journalism that can dictate the outcome of a presidential election. McCain has made a series of bizarre and demonstrably false claims about foreign policy, military affairs, and national security. Some have registered in the media, some haven’t. Either way, reporters have already made up their minds — McCain knows his stuff, even when he doesn’t, and all reporting on the senator’s campaign will be refracted through that agreed upon prism.

It wasn’t conscious. I don’t seriously believe there was a meeting and campaign reporters agreed on which assumptions were fair to make. But groupthink led to the same result — all the reporters “know” John McCain is an “expert,” in large part because he’s John McCain. Evidence that bolsters this conclusion is embraced, and evidence that contradicts it is ignored.

It’s the kind of advantage a major-party presidential candidate would pay any price to receive, and our campaign reporters have decided to give it to McCain for free. That must have been some barbecue.