Today's big goof up was one of those small but really embarrassing unforced errors. From the Politico:
Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.
Now it's easy to see what "volunteers" were worried about. A picture of Obama including two apparently Muslim women would be bound to appear on dozens (or who knows how many) wing nut blogs with Barack HUSSEIN Obama as the post title. Still, to exclude these women is playing into the hands of bigots, and that is something that one cannot allow oneself to do.
Closer to the man was Obama's gaffe about Jerusalem. From Reuters:
Addressing a pro-Israel lobby group this month, the Democratic White House hopeful said: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
The comment angered Palestinians, who want East Jerusalem, captured by Israel in 1967, as the capital of a future state. "He has closed all doors to peace," Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said after the June 4 speech.
The Obama campaign quickly invented excuses for the remarks, but surely they are exactly what they appear to be: evidence that the candidate just isn't that well informed on a lot of key issues.
Obama is surely eloquent, but he has shown some difficulties in remembering basic facts like how many states there are (50, not 57), or where he is at any one time. John Podhoretz, blogging for Commentary, makes this point:
It is clear Obama’s path to victory is through the teleprompter. Let him give a big speech and he drives it like Tiger Woods hitting a fairway, as he did Sunday with his stunning sermon about the importance of fathers. But let him sit for an interview with a well-prepared reporter who isn’t interested in shilling for him and Obama makes mistake after mistake. This is what happened the other day with ABC’s Jake Tapper, who got Obama to talk about how we need to treat terrorism as a law-enforcement matter — which is exactly what he should not be saying if he wants to solidify those less-liberal Democratic votes in the states where he was shellacked by Hillary Clinton — and how he opposes all forms of school choice — which works against his vague message that he is a vague agent of vague change.
Now I think these are more interesting cases. Obama surely had a point: terrorists arrested inside the United States will be subject to the justice system, and there is no reason why that system is not up to the job. But what we need to know about a President Obama is that he would be willing to make the hard choices that international terrorism might force on him. Suppose his national security adviser walks into his office and informs him that a terrorist attack against the U.S. is being assembled at a certain location, say, in Sudan. Will he order his officers to use any means at their disposal to acquire the target, or command them to wait until a warrant can be obtained to listen in on their conversations? Will he order his forces to launch an attack the way a nation attacks its enemies in war, or hesitate for fear of violating international law?
What seems to happen again and again is that Obama says the things he needs to say about all this only after it turns into a controversy. I suspect the reason for this is very simple: he spent twenty years talking only to people who were clustered well to the left of center on the political spectrum. Republicans should not be too hopeful about this. I am guessing that Obama Inc. will firm up pretty quickly. But just right now the candidate is a bit accident prone.
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