Last week Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) told Politico that he did not know how many homes he and his wife Cindy own. “I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain said. ThinkProgress noted that even though McCain’s comment highlights his poor record on the housing crisis and his economic policies that primarily benefit the rich, many in the media leaped to McCain’s defense, saying the gaffe was not “a big deal.”
Today on ABC’s This Week, Time Magazine’s Mark Halperin took the media’s McCain defense a step further, arguing that the fact that McCain doesn’t know how many houses he owns “is going to be one of the worst moments in the entire campaign” — not for McCain, but for Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL):
HALPERIN: My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.
To their credit, some of Halperin’s fellow panelists questioned his logic. “I’m having a little trouble following your argument,” host George Stephanopoulos said. Watch it:
It seems that the media all too often jump at the chance to defend McCain. Also last week, McCain agreed that the U.S. should reconstitute the military draft. Yet some in the media argued that McCain hadn’t actually agreed to this policy change (he did) and instead chose to give McCain “the benefit of the doubt.”
Moreover, many media figures recently argued that the Russia-Georgia conflict was good for McCain, despite the fact that many of his policy stances toward Russia would have pushed the U.S. closer to war during this particular crisis.
In fact, Halperin himself jumped in on this bandwagon, saying the Russia-Georgia conflict was great for McCain because it “allows him to talk tough on foreign policy.”