It seems that Senator Barack Obama has said something a bit off key to get the bloggers, pundits and newscasters, not to mention the Clinton team, in an uproar again. At least this time it isn’t anything to scream “foul” over, just a simple miscount. In one of his many speeches, the junior senator from Illinois tells his audience that he has been to “57” states with “one more left to go” (he also explains that his staff had nixed the idea of going to Alaska or Hawaii). So a lot of people are now having a little fun at Senator Obama’s expense.
But Senator Obama’s gaffe is nowhere near the worst gaffe of this campaign year. There have been some real eye-openers, some laugh-out-loud-mistakes, and some not even worth mentioning except to perhaps to get a rise out of the opposition.
Back in October, Mitt Romney repeatedly interchanged the names Barack Obama and Osama bin Laden in a speech in Greenwood, South Carolina. Although the Romney campaign was quick to assert that Romney simply mispoke and Obama simply shrugged it off, saying, “That happens…”, Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton told ABC News: “Apparently, Mitt Romney can switch names just as casually as he switches positions…” The Romney camp was playing cheap politics, associating the name of the infamous terrorist with the Democratic candidate for effect, yet doing so with plausible deniability built in.
Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential candidate, recently visited the Middle East to promote his foreign policy expertise. While in Jordan, McCain repeatedly made the remarks that it was “common knowledge” that al Qaedists were being trained by Iran. He said it more than once before an aide corrected him soto voce. For those not in the know, Iran is a Shiite nation. Al Qaeda is a Sunni extremist group. Senator McCain was conflating Shiite terrorists being trained in Iran and fighting in Iraq with al Qaeda terrorists, something that president George W. Bush has done since the war began. However, the difference is that Senator McCain apologized and corrected his mistake.
The McCain gaffe, though, was crushed under the reporting of another, seemingly far worse gaffe. Senator Hillary Clinton that same week in mid-March had described landing in a chopper under sniper fire during the Bosnian conflict. Video footage of that very landing later revealed that there was no such sniper fire. When the media went after her, Senator Clinton told the Philadelphia Daily News: “I went to 80 countries. I gave contemporaneous accounts, I wrote about a lot of this in my book. You know, I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day – so if I misspoke, that was just a misstatement.” A misstatement? Many pundits and analysts have raised this gaffe to the exalted position of an outright lie.
But the most recent gaffe (before the “57 states” gaffe) came from the Obama camp as well. Just before the Pennsylvania Primary, Senator Obama gave a speech where he represented rural voters as “bitter” and “clinging” to their religion and their guns. Whether it was a simple statement of his views of a desperate economy that became twisted or a denigration of rural voters, many voters in Pennsylvania took offense. This was used to great effect by the Clinton camp and Senator Obama, who was making progress into cutting into Clinton’s commanding lead, was stalled and lost Pennsylvania by 9% of the vote.
So Senator Obama can probably thank the heavens that this latest little slip-up is humorous and not a serious question of judgment as so many are.
It seems a shame that we have become such nitpicking nation, finding fault in everything the candidate’s do (misspeak, not attribute, equivocate, laugh too loudly, get a haircut) or simply are (elitist, rich, too black, woman, not black enough, not woman enough, aged) . One gets the feeling that the presidential race is nothing more than a superficial scorecard — whoever ends up with the least blemishes wins. And this never-ending campaign, despite the well-planned and constructed photo ops and the orchestrated everything, will undoubtedly produce quite a few more before it is all over.
Sources:
Darrell Carden, “Obama’s 57 state goof isn’t the real story,” AlphaPatriot.com
“Obama camp rips Romney for Osama gaffe,” ABCNews.com
Cameron W. Barr and Michael D. Shear, “A McCain Gaffe in Jordan,” WashingtonPost.com
Philip Sherwell, “Hillary Clinton defends Bosnia gaffe,” Telegraph.co.uk
David Brody, “Obama’s “Bitter” Comment,” CBNNews.com
