Having now heard the audio of McCain’s Iraq “gaffe”, I think it’s pretty small potatoes. He said “al-Qaeda,” he meant “insurgents” were getting aid and training from the Iranians. And he corrected himself within, oh, fifteen, thirty seconds or so.
He’s deploying the useful defense of “let he who is without misspeaking sin cast the first stone.”
“We all misspeak from time to time and I immediately corrected it. Just as Sen. Obama said he was looking forward to meeting the president of Canada, we all misspeak from time to time,” McCain told reporters in London.
“So we’ll just move on,” the presumptive Republican nominee said after talks with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at his Downing St. residence.
Yesterday, ABC News jumped on Hillary saying she had traveled to Africa with Joe Wilson (Valerie Plame’s husband) when she had actually traveled with his predecessor, Susan Rice (now an Obama adviser). Candidates who speak, on the record, for hours each day, have to be given a little slack to misspeak every now and then.
Hillary and Obama will have lots of other opportunities to whack McCain; this is one of the weaker ones.