A brief history of Obama’s flubs

[ReardenSteel]

Barack Gaffes
The Obama machine.
By Michelle Malkin

All it takes is one gaffe to taint a Republican for life. The political establishment never let Dan Quayle live down his fateful misspelling of “potatoe.” The New York Times distorted and misreported the first President Bush’s questions about new scanner technology at a grocers’ convention to brand him permanently as out of touch.

But what about Barack Obama? The guy’s a perpetual gaffe machine. Let us count the ways, large and small, that his tongue has betrayed him throughout the campaign:

See link for list. (Malkin rules!)

 

[Willow]

 Over the weekend in Oregon, Obama pleaded ignorance of the decades-old, multibillion-dollar massive Hanford nuclear-waste cleanup: “Here’s something that you will rarely hear from a politician, and that is that I’m not familiar with the Hanford, uuuuhh, site, so I don’t know exactly what’s going on there. (Applause.) Now, having said that, I promise you I’ll learn about it by the time I leave here on the ride back to the airport.”

I assume on that ride, a staffer reminded him that he’s voted on at least one defense-authorization bill that addressed the “costs, schedules, and technical issues” dealing with the nation’s most contaminated nuclear-waste site.


I just frickin" hate it when that happens"   

[DixieBelle]

I think we should compile a list of his gaffes and post them here. If we can gather them, then I will sticky this thread for easy reference as the campaign goes on.

[ReardenSteel]

I think we should compile a list of his gaffes and post them here. If we can gather them, then I will sticky this thread for easy reference as the campaign goes on.

Michelle Malkin hit a bunch in the link above but I don't want to bring the whole article over as I'm unsure of the proper rules/etiquette on that. That said, here are a few more from Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times...

Obama's gaffes start to pile up
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2007/03/sweet_column_item_obamas_gaffe.html

• Obama told Larry King on CNN -- asked about that anti-Hillary Rodham Clinton YouTube ad, a doctored version of a spot created for Apple computers -- "We don't have the technical capacity to create something like that."

Obama did not know what he was talking about. Any professional media consultant can manipulate images on video. Turns out the creator -- unmasked last week as a political operative who worked for a firm overseeing the technical side of Obama's Web site -- made it at home on a Mac.

Cynicism is like terrorism?
• One of Obama's stump lines is that the biggest obstacle he fights is not any of his rivals, it is cynicism. He used a variation of it during a reception he hosted at a conference here sponsored by AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Displaying a tin ear, Obama said that one of the enemies is not "just terrorists" or "just Hezbollah" or "just Hamas" -- "it's also cynicism."

More at link, some repeats from the OP link.

Another Obama gaffe
Los Angeles Times (!!)
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2007/08/another-obama-g.html

Then in a major foreign policy speech designed to enhance his credibility as a potential leader he suggested he might unilaterally bomb the U.S. ally and nuclear power Pakistan if that country's president was insufficently on the program about chasing Al Qaeda leaders. Then Obama ruled out the use of nuclear weapons, which Clinton suggested presidents should never do.

In the Chicago gathering before an Obama-friendly hometown crowd, the subject turned to trade in general and the North American Free Trade Agreement in particular, which bothers union members fearing job losses. Obama said upon becoming president, "I would immediately call the president of Mexico, the president of Canada, to try to amend NAFTA, because I think that we can get labor agreements in that agreement right now."

Problem is, as some Harvard graduates might know, our next-door neighbor Canada doesn't have a president. For more than 140 years now it has had a parliamentary system and ...

...the top political leader is the prime minister, who is the head of the controlling party in Parliament.

Obama Gaffes on Iraq and Afghanistan
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalradar/2008/05/obama-gaffes-on.html

No sooner did Obama realize his mistake -- and correct himself -- but he immediately made another.

"We need agricultural specialists in Afghanistan, people who can help them develop other crops than heroin poppies, because the drug trade in Afghanistan is what is driving and financing these terrorist networks. So we need agricultural specialists," he said.

So far, so good.

"But if we are sending them to Baghdad, they're not in Afghanistan," Obama said.

Iraq has many problems, but encouraging farmers to grow food instead of opium poppies isn't one of them. In Iraq, oil fields not poppy fields are a major source of U.S. technical assistance.

[ReardenSteel]

A seperate Afganistan gaffe than the one above. 

Obama Gaffe Check
http://www.willisms.com/archives/2007/08/obama_gaffe_che.html

"We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there."

Interestingly, the AP came to Obama's defense on this one. They just do it very badly, LOL. (see link)