Having given the whole McCain/Zapatero business a bit more thought, it really seems to me that the McCain campaign, and Randy Scheunemann in particular, is trying to provide an ex post facto explanation for McCain’s odd/non-answer of a question about meeting with the Spanish Prime Minister.

It is as though it is better to turn a cold shoulder to the Spanish than to admit that McCain misunderstood what he was being asked.

Marc Ambinder corresponded with Scheunemann and was given the following response:

In this week’s interview, Senator McCain did not rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero, a NATO ally. If elected, he will meet with a wide range of allies in a wide variety of venues but is not going to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance. He also is not going to make reckless promises to meet America’s adversaries. It’s called keeping youtr options open, unlike Senator Obama who has publically committed to meeting some of the world’s worst dictators unconditionally in his first year in office.

That sounds like revisionist hooey, to be honest. It is, strictly speaking, true: mcCain did not rule in or out a WH meeting with Zapatero. However, that is a total obfuscation of the way McCain’s response to the question went down. Either McCain specifically went out of his way to send a message of displeasure to Zapatero or he didn’t understand what was being asked of him.

If he had wanted to leave the issue of a WH or other kind of visit open, he could have done so without making it sound as thought Zapatero was on the same plane as Hugo Chávez and Evo Morales in terms of current relations with the US.

I’m with Joe Klein on this one: “Seems to me that putting a chill in the relationship with one of our NATO allies simply because McCain misheard a question is going a bit far.” And really, that is what this sounds like, especially taking both of Scheunemann’s responses together (the first one was noted here)-it just seems like ill-advised damage control.

The bottom line is I really don’t believe that McCain was trying to make a definitive statement on US-Spanish relations in a McCain administration. Either he misheard/misunderstood what was being asked (while difficult to fully understand how this could be the case, a telephone and a foreign accent was involved here, so some benefit of the doubt is warranted, I suppose) or he didn’t remember who Zapatero was and decided to BS the response.

If it is one of the later two, and McCain is willing to spin it into some statement about US-Spanish relations, that doesn’t speak well to McCain’s character (i.e., he’d rather cause problems with an ally than own up to a mistake). Even if this is his policy preference and is willing to continue to punish Spain for pulling out of Iraq (as has been the Bush administration’s approach to the Zapatero government), when it was a clearly response to an election, that, too, raises serious questions about his foreign policy intentions going forward.