OBAMARAMA

Greg Sargent over at TPM’s Horse’s Mouth blog has an incisive post about the discrepancy in media outrage over Sen. Obama’s “gaffe” immediately following his official campaign announcement — where he referred to the lost lives of soldiers in Iraq as having been “wasted” — and an almost identical comment by Sen. John McCain this week.

Here’s Obama’s remark from two weeks ago:

Obama, discussing his opposition to the Iraq war, said the war “should have never been authorized, and should have never been waged, and on which we’ve now spent $400 billion, and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.'’

Meanwhile, announcing his candidacy on “Late Night with David Letterman,” Sen. John McCain said the following:

“Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be,” McCain said about the Iraq War. “We’ve wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives.”

The difference between the two comments in terms of substance? Nonexistent. But the difference in the public attention each remark has received is astounding.

As usual, Sargent asks exactly the right question: “How many times do you suppose mainstream media commentators will refer to McCain’s fumble as a ‘mistake,’ a ‘gaffe,’ or any similar such term?” At the time of his posting a day after McCain’s appearance, he says, there had been exactly zero such stories.

By contrast, he notes, Sen. Obama’s remark was widely reported on in this highly negative fashion:

[W]hen Obama committed this error, he was greeted with a fusillade of stand-alone stories, many of them hammering him for his political screw-up. “His first stumble,” said the Chicago Sun Times. “Stumbling out of the gate,” said political wise man Ron Fournier in a piece carried by MSNBC. Matt Lauer of NBC wondered: “How big a fallout will there be over this?” There was plenty of other babbling about it on cable, too.

Now, McCain has apologized — but even coverage of his apology notably refers to his “remark” or “comment,” rather than to his “gaffe” or “mistake” or “stumble.”

For what it’s worth, News Hounds also has a helpful look back at the beating Sen. Obama took from FOX News in the wake of his remark. Will McCain receive the same treatment? I’ll give you two guesses, but you’ll only need one.

UPDATE: Typically classy, Sen. Obama defended Sen. McCain yesterday:

“As somebody who has had the same phrase in a speech — you know, I think that nobody would question Sen. McCain’s dedication to our veterans,” he said.

“What both he and I have simply tried to express is that when you give a mission to our extraordinarily brave soldiers that’s not thought through, it’s a failure of civilian leadership,” the Illinois senator said.