All of a sudden, John McCain has a problem with Spain. In an interview Monday with Radio Caracol WSUA 1260AM, a Spanish-language station from Miami, the Republican presidential nominee was asked whether he would "be willing to invite President Jose Luis Zapatero to the White House." This should have been an easy question for McCain to answer--because he's answered it before.

Speaking to a reporter from the Spanish newspaper El Pais back in early April, McCain said, "this is the moment to leave behind discrepancies with Spain." (President Bush has yet to hold a formal bilateral meeting with the center-left Zapatero, who withdrew troops from Iraq shortly after taking office in 2004.) "I would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States," McCain added. "I am very interested not only in normalizing relations with Spain but in obtaining good and productive relations with the goal of addressing many issues and challenges that we have to confront together." Sounds sensible enough, right?

Except it's not what McCain said Monday. Instead, the Arizona senator responded to Radio Caracol's question with some boilerplate about being "willing to meet with those leaders who are friends and want to work with us in a cooperative fashion." Pressed to be more specific, McCain simply repeated his talking point: "I can assure you I will establish closer relations with our friends and I will stand up to those who want to do harm to the United States of America." Needless to say, that's an unusual way to refer to a European democracy and fellow member of NATO--as confused Spanish commenters have pointed out in the days since McCain's remarks broke overseas. Especially if you've already said that you "would like" its leader "to visit" the U.S.

How to account for the candidate's newly noncommittal position? As far as I can tell, Spain hasn't done anything since April to offend McCain--nothing, at least, that would move the European country off of his "must normalize relations" list and into some indeterminate gray area between "our friends" and "those who want to do us harm." That's why I can't help but think that what seems like a reversal was simply a misunderstanding.

Listening to the exchange again, it sounds as if McCain never quite knew who or what he was talking about. Maybe he misheard "Zapatero" as "Zapatista" or "Zapata." (The interviewer had a thick accent.) Maybe the name didn't ring a bell. Either way, McCain seemed to assume that after a long conversation about our enemies to the south--folks like Fidel Castro and Hugo Cesar* Chavez--he was being asked about yet another Latin American bad guy. That would explain why he cited Mexican President Felipe Calderon as an example of a "cooperative" friend; referred to his past work "with leaders in the hemisphere"; and said his decision to meet would be based on "the importance of our relationship Latin America and the entire region"--because he wasn't referring to Spain, or Europe, or Zapatero at all. In this interpretation, McCain was never quite clear on which country and leader Radio Caracol was asking him about and was simply sticking to platitudes to avoid making a mistake. 

That strikes me as an understandable error--at least initially. It's not unusual for a politician to bluff his response to a misheard question, and McCain was vague enough not to say anything diplomatically disastrous. Unlike the liberal blogosphere, I don't think this incident exposes him as a foreign-policy fraud (or senile old coot) who doesn't "doesn't know who the leader of Spain is."

For me, the problem is what McCain and Co. did after the apparent misunderstanding: they claimed that he had understood all along. According to top foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann, "there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred." The candidate's vagueness, says Scheunemann, simply reflected the fact that McCain does not want to "rule in or rule out a White House meeting with President Zapatero" and is reluctant "to spell out scheduling and meeting location specifics in advance." Given that McCain has already said he "would like for [President Zapatero] to visit the United States"--and didn't use the "scheduling or meeting location" excuse in the interview--Scheunemann's explanation strikes me as unsettling no matter how you slice it. Either he's telling the truth and McCain was deliberately (rather than mistakenly) comparing the Spanish prime minister to the anti-American leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba by saying he'd be "willing to meet with any leader who is dedicated to the same principles and philosophy that we are for human rights, democracy and freedom," and then pointedly refusing to include Zapatero (a democratic leader) in that category. (I won't "rule in or rule out" whether Spain is the enemy.) Or Scheunemann is covering up McCain's confusion with spin, which means the campaign is willing to complicate its candidate's foreign-policy positions--and his potential relationship with a major European ally--to avoid exposing him to (comparatively minor) charges of ignorance. Or hearing loss. Or whatever.

Option One--McCain's stance on Spain has become needlessly derogatory for no particular reason--suggests that he's erratic. Option Two--McCain is willing to adopt a needlessly derogatory stance simply to protect against the perception of a gaffe--suggests that he puts politics before policy. Either one strikes me as a far more disturbing error than mishearing--or not recognizing--the name Jose Luis Zapatero.

And that is a problem.

*D'oh. Stupid mix-up. Good thing I'm not running for president.