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People have to say weird things when they're running, or helping someone else run, for president:
A few minutes later, a young man asked why, in 1983, McCain had voted against making Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s birthday a national holiday. McCain said that he had been wrong and had come to realize that he had made a mistake. Another asked what the Senator thought was the most pressing issue facing African-Americans. “First of all, assuring equal rights for every single American,” he replied. “As Dr. King said, a person is judged not for the color of their skin but the content of their character. I believe that’s an exact quote. The second thing I think is what’s being done here. We’ve got to give people the education and training they need to compete and go as far as their ambitions will take them. . . . The third thing, if I may say so, is the encouragement of the family.” He emphasized the importance of having “at least a two-parent situation, and so we have to do whatever we can to foster and encourage the family.”There was something almost comic about an older white man who had moved on from his first family lecturing a group of young black men about family values, but McCain did not appear awkward or uneasy until Mike Huckabee joined him at the microphone and put a finer point on the negative aspects of single parenthood.“The fact is that if a child grows up without the benefit of both the mother and the father there is a seven hundred per cent greater likelihood that child will spend a good portion of his life in poverty,” Huckabee said. “It becomes an accelerated problem, which the Senator, I believe, understands, and I think he understands it better than anybody else running for President.Mike Huckabee can't possibly believe that John McCain, himself an absent father, better understands the problems of single-parent families in the black community better than Barack Obama, who black man who grew up with a single mother, right?
