Some Are "Gaffes", Some Are Lessons Mislearned

[Kathianne]

In the course of a discussion over the past days, Bully asked me to list some of Barack Obama's gaffes, which I did.

I've been thinking about this, I dismissed the 'gaffes' as I do McCain's, it's grueling to campaign for the presidency. People get tired, they're disorientated about where they are, moving from city to city, state to state; I bet it's easy to think there are over 500 states! (j/k)

But upon reflection some 'gaffes' are not as trivial as they appear, though I do think the ones I listed were. Here is another Obama 'gaffe', though I think that is the wrong label, rather he either missed who did what or his doesn't understand important issues in history. Putting his 'world tour' in context of the past week, well I'd hope that even the pro-Obama folks would raise issues with the candidate; it wasn't "the world that saved Berlin, it was the US Air Force and its CIC:

The Boston Globe
JEFF JACOBY
Missing from that Berlin speech

By Jeff Jacoby | July 27, 2008

BARACK OBAMA had ample reason to recall the Berlin Airlift of 1948 during his dramatic speech in the German capital last week. The airlift was an early and critical success for the West in the Cold War, with clear relevance to our own time, the war in Iraq, and the free world's conflict with radical Islam. But having reached back 60 years to that pivotal hour of American leadership, Obama proceeded to draw from it exactly the wrong lessons.

The Soviet Union had blockaded western Berlin on June 24, 1948, choking off access to the city by land and water and threatening 2.5 million people with starvation. Moscow was determined to force the United States and its allies out of Berlin. To capitulate to Soviet pressure, as Obama rightly noted, "would have allowed Communism to march across Europe." Yet many in the West advocated retreat, fearing that the only way to keep the city open was to use the atomic bomb - and launch World War III....

...But not once in his Berlin speech did Obama acknowledge Truman's fortitude, or even mention his name. Nor did he mention the US Air Force, or the 31 American pilots who died during the airlift.

Indeed, Obama seemed to go out of his way not to say plainly that what saved Berlin in that dark time was America's military might. Save for a solitary reference to "the first American plane," he never described one of the greatest American operations of the postwar period as an American operation at all. He spoke only of "the airlift," "the planes," "those pilots." Perhaps their American identity wasn't something he cared to stress amid all his "people of the world" salutations and talk of "global citizenship."

"People of the world," Obama declaimed, "look at Berlin, where a wall came down, a continent came together, and history proved that there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one." But the world didn't stand as one during the Cold War; it was riven by an Iron Curtain. For more than four decades, America and the West confronted an implacable enemy on the other side of that divide. What finally defeated that enemy and ended the Cold War was not harmony and goodwill, but American strength and resolve.

Obama's speech was a paean to international cooperation. "Now is the time to join together," he said. "It was this spirit that led airlift planes to appear in the sky above our heads." No - it was a Democratic president named Truman, who had the audacity to order an airlift when others counseled retreat, and the grit to see it through when others were ready to withdraw.

Sixty years later, it is a very different kind of Democrat who is running for president. Obama may have wowed 'em in Berlin, but he's no Harry Truman.