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.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
July 16 editorial cartoons
Cartoons Wednesday’s political cartoons include the Epstein files landing on everyone's summer reading list, and the relationship between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
-
Viktor Orban: is time up for Europe's longest-serving premier?
Today's Big Question Hungarian PM's power is under threat 'but not in the way – or from the people – one might expect'
-
Operation Rubific: the government's secret Afghan relocation scheme
The Explainer Massive data leak a 'national embarrassment' that has ended up costing taxpayer billions