McCain Taking Heat for New Ad

John McCain’s new ad calls Barack Obama “dangerously unprepared to be president” and criticizes his remark for calling Iran a “tiny” country. But a McCain attack in the ad is now coming under scrutiny.

Here’s the line in question: “Obama says Iran is a ‘tiny’ country, ‘doesn’t pose a serious threat.'”

While Obama indeed had said that Iran is “tiny” during a campaign event in Oregon in May, he said that while comparing the Islamic country to the Soviet Union, notes ABC News’s Jake Tapper. Obama said at the same event that Iran “doesn’t pose a serious threat” in the same way the Soviet Union had.

Tapper called McCain’s ad a “dishonest representation” of what Obama said.

Here’s the full Obama quote from a May campaign event in Oregon that McCain’s ad focuses on:

“Strong countries and strong Presidents talk to their adversaries. That’s what Kennedy did with Khrushchev. That’s what Reagan did with Gorbachev. That’s what Nixon did with Mao. I mean think about it. Iran, Cuba, Venezuela — these countries are tiny compared to the Soviet Union. They don’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union posed a threat to us. And yet we were willing to talk to the Soviet Union at the time when they were saying we’re going to wipe you off the planet. And ultimately that direct engagement led to a series of measures that helped prevent nuclear war, and over time allowed the kind of opening that brought down the Berlin Wall. Now, that has to be the kind of approach that we take. You know, Iran, they spend one-one hundredth of what we spend on the military. If Iran ever tried to pose a serio us threat to us, they wouldn’t stand a chance. And we should use that position of strength that we have to be bold enough to go ahead and listen. That doesn’t mean we agree with them on everything. We might not compromise on any issues, but at least we should find out other areas of potential common interest, and we can reduce some of the tensions that has caused us so many problems around the world.”