Willard for the day

John Harwood has an article in The New York Times about mis-speaking in public:

As critics pummel Mitt Romney over his secretly recorded comments at a fund-raiser, he can at least take comfort in the fact that he’s not the first.
Presidential campaign history overflows with candidates who tripped over their own loose tongues— some obscuring their actual meaning, others accidentally revealing it. Even a cursory analysis shows that well over 47 percent of races for the White House have seen a candidate suffer self-inflicted wounds.
In Romney’s case, he stood by his remarks, but nevertheless acknowledged he had spoken inelegantly.
What follows is a list of the Top Ten verbal misfires under the pitiless glare on the national political stage:

•Senator John McCain in 2008: “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

This off-key attempt at reassurance, delivered in mid-September as Lehman Brothers was collapsing, helped seal the fate of a losing campaign. The beneficiary was Barack Obama, who had endured his own embarrassment over a secretly recorded remark to donors that some working-class voters “cling to their guns or religion” as reasons to support Republicans.

•Senator John Kerry in 2004: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.”

The unfortunate comment about money to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, made by Kerry in March during a college event in Pennsylvania, helped cement his reputation as an equivocating politician after President George W. Bush’s campaign exploited it in mocking television ads.

•Vice President Al Gore in 2000: “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”

Critics seized on this clumsy assertion, made during a March of 1999 CNN interview, to lampoon Gore as a brazen embellisher taking credit for the innovation. The attacks later helped George W. Bush’s campaign to influence media post-mortems after a fall 2000 debate in which Gore made minor misstatements. Gore ultimately received more votes; but Bush moved into the White House the next January.

•President Bill Clinton in 1996: “You think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too.”

With that acknowledgment at a 1995 Houston fund-raiser, Clinton roiled Democrats, Republicans, and his own aides. He won re-election easily anyway, in part by linking his Republican opponent, Bob Dole, to Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had bluntly predicted his agenda would cause the existing structure of Medicare to “wither on the vine”.

•President George Bush, 1992: “Message: I care.”

Stung by accusations that he was disconnected from the economic struggles of average Americans, Bush fueled them by giving New Hampshire voters this piece of political stage direction. Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” campaign proved resonant enough to withstand publication of a 1970 letter in which he acknowledged having avoided fighting in Vietnam without resisting the draft “to preserve my political viability”. He won a three-way race against Bush and Ross Perot.

•Governor Michael S. Dukakis, 1988: “I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”

This emotionless response, to a debate question whose hypothetical premise involving the rape and murder of his wife, fixed Dukakis’ image as a governmental technocrat at odds with most Americans on the high-voltage issue of crime and punishment.
That liability trumped the plutocratic mien that George Bush, then the vice president, had taken on in explaining his Iowa straw poll defeat this way: “A lot of the people who support me, they were at an air show, they were at their daughter’s coming-out party, or teeing up at the golf course in that all-important last round.” Bush won handily.

•Walter F. Mondale in 1984: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Intending to impress with candor, Mondale handed President Ronald Reagan a weapon with this stunner in his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. Reagan’s celebration of Morning in America and warnings against tax-and-spend liberalism produced a landslide— despite his shaky debate performances, most famous for one rambling response that began: “I remember driving down the California coast one day.”

•Ronald Reagan in 1980: “Approximately eighty percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation.”

Democrats used this so-called killer trees statement to cast Reagan as a know-nothing, extremist, retired actor. But economic conditions and the plight of American hostages in Iran created such an appetite for change that Reagan swept to victory after dismissing a debate attack from President Jimmy Carter with the killer rejoinder, “There you go again.”

•President Gerald Ford in 1976: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

The misstatement, intended to signal solidarity with those under the Soviet Union’s thumb, allowed Carter to question the incumbent’s foreign policy acumen. Carter won a close race despite his own awkward confession to Playboy magazine that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times”.

•George W. Romney in 1968: “When I came back from Vietnam I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get.”

This summer of 1967 remark, about Romney’s conversations with American diplomats and military leaders on the war in Southeast Asia, led to the collapse of his challenge to Richard M. Nixon for the Republican nomination. It also prompted this lacerating response from the Democratic candidate, Eugene McCarthy: “A light rinse would have been sufficient.” That catastrophic gaffe produced a striking bit of recent political analysis from Romney’s son Mitt. During his failed bid for the 2008 Republican nomination, the younger Romney said his father’s experience was “probably not that applicable to today” because candidates possess heightened awareness of their vulnerability. “Running for president in the YouTube era, you realize you have to be very judicious in what you say,” Romney told The New York Times in 2007. “You have to be careful with your humor. You have to recognize that anytime you’re running for the presidency of the United States, you’re on.”

Rico says let's hope that Romney does as well in the election as Dukakis and Mondale did...