McCain's "Knowledge Gap": It's An Issue

Senator John McCain's latest gaffe on Social Security is somewhat breathtaking, and ought to be a campaign issue. It indicates that he is not any better informed on major domestic policy issues than he is on foreign policy (which is supposedly his "strength").

Readers whose memory extends beyond the 48-hour news cycle may recall that on March 18, at a press conference in Amman, Jordan, McCain stated that "al-Qaeda is going back into Iran and receiving training and are coming back into Iraq from Iran, that's well known. And it's unfortunate."

Senator Joe Lieberman, who was standing next to him, whispered in his ear, causing McCain to immediately issue a correction. The McCain campaign stated that it was just a slip of the tongue, and the Sunday talk shows gave the candidate a pass. But McCain had said the same thing twice before during the same week. It was no slip of the tongue.

How serious of a confusion was this? As is "well-known," the Iranian government is run by Shiites, and Al-Qaeda is Sunni -- in fact the Al-Qaeda types tend not to even recognize the Shiites as believers. So this repeated false statement indicates that McCain is missing some very basic knowledge of the region.

Now back to the home front. John McCain said on Monday: "Americans have got to understand that we are paying present-day retirees with the taxes paid by young workers in America today. And that's a disgrace. It's an absolute disgrace, and it's got to be fixed."

But this is how Social Security has always been funded, and was set up to do exactly that. The Social Security payroll tax comes out of our paychecks, and pays for people who are retired. When we who are presently working retire, we will get Social Security from the taxes of people who are working. It's not clear where the disgrace is. The system has worked well for the past 70 years, helping to reduce the poverty rate among the elderly from 35.2 percent in 1959 to 9.4 percent in 2006. According to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it will continue paying all promised benefits for the next 38 years without any changes. Only minor changes -- less than those implemented in each one of the decades of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, or 80s -- will be necessary over the next 75 years to keep it paying all promised benefits indefinitely.

Then there is energy policy, where McCain claims that offshore drilling in environmentally sensitive areas will reduce our dependence on foreign oil and lower gasoline prices. But according to the Energy Information Agency, McCain's proposed drilling would produce too little oil (less the two tenths of one percent of world oil supply) to have a significant effect on oil prices. Not to mention that it would be ten years before we would see any oil at all.

Of course the Obama campaign would want to be careful and polite about criticizing McCain. Obama should not be seen as making fun of McCain for having a lesser education than a guy who was president of the Harvard Law Review and graduated magna cum laude. Or for not being as sharp as he might have been a couple of decades ago.

Indeed, there are plenty of sharp policy wonks on the wrong side of any issue. The president doesn't have to be a master of detail. He has advisors. But he has to at least learn enough from his advisors to be able to make an informed decision. McCain doesn't seem to be able to do this, and his mistakes seem to be more about ideological blindness and political deception than a lack of education.

McCain's nonsense about Al-Qaeda is remarkably similar to one of the major deceptions that got us into Iraq in the first place, when the Bush administration managed to convince the majority of Americans that Saddam Hussein was tied to Al-Qaeda and even to the September 11 terrorist attacks. The gaffe about Social Security is in line with standard right-wing fairy tales about Social Security being some big Ponzi scheme about to go bust. And the off-shore drilling proposal looks like an effort to make it look like some very small efforts to preserve the environment -- rather than the long-term failure of U.S. energy policy -- are responsible for soaring gasoline prices.

But regardless of motivation, McCain's "knowledge gap" should raise some doubts about whether he is qualified to be president.

This was published by Alternet on July 11, 2008.

Comments

[4President]

Does anyone really believe McCain has a shot? Why, if the race is so close - does the msm slant coverage the way it does? Balance. Newspapers are almost dead and television soon to follow.

[Chillinout]

Here's another wrinkle in this whole drill, drill, drill ideology. There hasn't been a new refinery built in this country in 30 years. The one we have are near or at capacity, (another reason gas prices are so high). Even if we were able to pull a billion barrels of oil out of the ground, it wouldn't be able to be refined.

I don't know why people on the MSM or anywhere else for that matter are not telling this side of the story.

[jvarga]

For whatever its worth, when they drag the oil people in for Senate hearings (which they do periodically and CNN streams them on its website) the oil people continually counter that with the fact that existing refineries are being expanded, they're just not building new facilities. I don't put a lot of faith in anything those guys say, but its worth putting out there that they say it, I guess.

Of course, that also suggests to me that there must be some tax or environmental loophole that they can exploit by expansion instead of building a new facility.

[jvarga]

Don't forget his recent healthcare gaffes, such as not knowing what a condom does.

[BottomLine2008]

Come on. With all the screwing around he did in the Navy, he knows what a condom does.

[Chillinout]

You are assuming he used one. In the 60's and 70's most men did not use a condom. All the STDs you could get back then could be cured with a shot of penicillin. Not a whole lot of risk there. So it is possible that he doesn't know what a condom is, or how it works.

[hopeless277]

We don't care how stupid our president is. Just as long as his VP is a criminal, that's really all we want. And maybe the next time our Unitary Executive wants to start a war, we could just gather up thousands of men, women, and children and murder them on the spot instead of sending them across the globe to be murdered. Sure would save a lot of money.