“And what is Aleppo?”.
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The stumble could be a “serious blow” to Johnson’s campaign, says the New York Times, “just as he is making a final push to improve his standing in the polls”.
After an imperceptible pause, Barnicle replied, “You’re kidding”. “Aleppo is in Syria”.
So Barnicle explained: “Aleppo is in Syria”. Listening to his answer once it dawned on him that this was a question about the Syrian refugee crisis it was obvious he was not clueless on the issue since he knew the players who were involved.
But he said no one would have had the same reaction had Johnson been asked about Sirte, Libya, which was in the news a year ago due to fighting between the Libyan government and the Islamic State terrorist group. “Do you really think that foreign policy is so insignificant that somebody running for president of the United States shouldn’t even know what Aleppo is, where Aleppo is, why Aleppo is so important?” he asked.
“I hope voters get to see former GOP governors Gary Johnson and Bill Weld on the debate stages this fall”, the former MA governor tweeted Wednesday.
The moment comes as Johnson and Weld are struggling to reach 15 percent in the polls, the threshold needed to get into the presidential debates, the first of which will be held September 26. Clinton leads with 41.2 percent, Trump follows with 39.1 percent, and Green Party nominee Jill Stein has 3.3 percent.
As part of a media blitz in NY to try to raise his polling numbers enough to qualify for the upcoming presidential debates, Johnson fielded a range of questions Thursday with the aim of demonstrating he can take on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It wasn’t a full-throated endorsement and the election battle at this point is centered around Trump and Clinton and Romney has “yielded the stage”.
“You do occasionally blank”, Weld said, according to the Globe.
“Sure it should”, he said when asked if the incident should be treated as significant.
He added: “I have to get smarter, and that’s just part of the process”.
Johnson later acknowledged the error, saying he “blanked” and had been thinking of an acronym, not the Syrian city. His disregard for US foreign policy and strategic interests is so profound that he did not recognize a reference to Syria’s largest city, which, for several years, has been the site of intense fighting, massive war crimes and an ongoing humanitarian crisis that has, with its tidal wave of refugees, rocked prime USA allies in Europe. Should I have identified Aleppo? Yes. “I understand the significance”.
“I know there are self-appointed hystericists mostly located in the NY blog community who think it’s really bad, but let’s wait and see”, he added.
“I think probably 85 percent of the people couldn’t put Allepo on the map”, he said. It worked. That is what a President must do.
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“For those who believe this is a disqualifier, so be it”, he said.
