You’re seeing a persistent push from opponents of Obama to define the candidate as a “gaffe machine.”

I think it’s worth separating the wheat from the chaff when looking at Obama’s comments. Some of them are understandable verbal bobbles (although surprising coming from a man who generates headlines like, “Obama’s Oratory Grabbing Spotlight; Being Compared To JFK, Drawing Huge Crowds, Moving Some To Tears“.) But some reveal something more.

Like John Fund, I find Obama’s reference to an uncle who liberated Auschwitz pretty small potatoes – although, as I said, I do fault the entire press corps covering his remarks for not recognizing A) the Soviets liberated that camp and B) his mother was an only child, so something didn’t add up.

Obama’s reference to visiting 57 states, like his statement last year of tornadoes killing 10,000 people, are probably a reflection of mental exhaustion. I’ll even cut him slack when he talks about seeing “fallen heroes” in the audience before him.

Somewhere in the middle we can put his inadvertent comment that Afghanis speak Arabic, or his assertion “oftentimes our women servicemembers are more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder partly because they — there’s a sad, but real, problem of sexual harassment and sexual abuse for women veterans, and that makes them much more prone, then, to have post-traumatic stress disorder.”

More troubling is his quoting of unnamed commanders, like when he says, “If you talk to commanders on the ground there, they’ll tell you, ‘Instead of having another platoon, I’d rather have a couple of agricultural specialists.” It would help if, indeed, Obama had been anywhere near Afghanistan lately to talk to said commanders on the ground.

But sometimes the gaffe more closely resembles unfiltered thoughts, or a Freudian slip.

Foremost among these is Obama’s comment at a fundraiser on Billionaire’s Row in San Francisco, describing small town Pennsylvanians as “bitter” and clinging to guns, religion, xenophobia, antipathy to those different than themselves, and opposition to trade deals. Obama clearly understands the cultures of the streets of Jakarta and Nairobi better than he understands the culture of the streets of Scranton, Pennsylvania. If elected, he would be the first President who would need to appoint an ambassador to West Virginia.

Or that his grandmother, when making racially insensitive comments, was behaving as a “typical white person.”

I think that when Obama criticized those who wanted to call Jeremiah Wright a crank and a demagogue, he really believed that he was a better judge of character than Americans who recoiled from Wright’s sermons.

And I think Obama really does think of William Ayers as just a professor in the neighborhood; when he shook Ayers’ hand in the past, he never considered that the same hand once built a bomb to be placed in a women’s bathroom in the Pentagon.

UPDATE: A couple readers interpret this post as largely defending Obama, particularly on Ayers. Not my intent. I’m saying that Obama’s reaction to Stephanopolous’ question reveals that to Obama, it is unthinkable that associating with a domestic terrorist would be a legitimate concern, and that he can’t grasp why anyone would be upset with him for his long relationship with Ayers.