McCain versus Spain

Does the GOP nominee see Spain as friend or foe?

“John McCain either doesn’t want to meet Spain’s prime minister any time soon or isn’t quite sure who he is,” said Daniel Woolls in the AP (via Google News). Asked if he would host Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero at the White House, in an interview with a Spanish-language radio station, McCain talked about working with friendly leaders in Latin America. He mentioned Mexico and “leaders in the hemisphere,” but never Spain or Zapatero.

It sounds like McCain just missed the question and stuck to “platitudes to avoid making a mistake,” said Andrew Romano in Newsweek online. That doesn’t expose McCain “as a foreign-policy fraud (or senile old coot),” but the clarification from his campaign—that McCain understood the question and won’t commit to meeting Spain’s leader—is disturbing.

It takes “some chutzpah to accuse McCain of somehow ‘slighting’ the Spanish prime minister,” said Soeren Kern in Pajamas Media, after Zapatero has backed Barack Obama and heads “one of the most anti-American governments in Europe.” The U.S. does have frosty relations with Spain, but it’s the leftist Zapatero’s fault, not McCain’s.