Fat new targets for the Gaffe Patrol
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
The Gaffe Patrol is on the job this week in
Charlotte. Bob Schieffer of CBS News, a wing
commander who does not ordinarily fly combat
missions, got the first kill at the Democratic
National Convention. When Gov. Martin O’Malley of
Maryland inadvertently committed a gaffe – defined
as a politician unexpectedly blurting the truth – he
suddenly flew into Mr. Schieffer’s gunsights.
“Can you honestly say,” the Face the Nation host
asked the governor, “that people are better off
today than they were four years ago?”
“No,” Mr. O’Malley replied, “but, uh, that’s not the
question of this election. The question, without a
doubt, we are not as well off as we were before
George Bush brought us . . .” Blah, blah, blah . . .
Mr. Schieffer interrupted him with a reminder as
unexpected as a burst of gunfire through the
propeller of the Sopwith Camel that is the favorite
pursuit plane of the Gaffe Patrol: “George Bush is
not on the ballot.”
The governor apparently bailed out as his own plane
went down somewhere over the Eastern Shore. He was
not injured, and the next morning he was back on the
air with “context” and a “clarification.” Everybody
is “clearly better off,” he said, but what he meant
was that Americans “have not recovered all that we
lost in the Bush recession.”
What is actually clear is that this is the question
that terrifies Barack Obama and his campaign. This
is the question famously posed by Ronald Reagan in
1980 in his final debate with Jimmy Carter, and the
question destroyed the peanut farmer from Plains.
Mr. Carter, the president who President Obama so
closely resembles, had no answer. The Obama campaign
has no answer now.
The best they can come up with is that the question
is not the question, and besides, it’s all George W.
Bush’s fault. Joe Biden tried this Monday in
Detroit, and said he could recite a lot of good
things Mr. Obama has done “if it weren’t so hot.”
The president and his faithful minions must move
earth (heaven can wait) to prevent consideration of
the question. They could expand their campaign
against George W. FDR and the Democrats, even as
late as Harry Truman, similarly campaigned against
Herbert Hoover.
Once upon a time, we called our recessions and
depressions “great panics,” as in the Panic of 1837
(Andrew Jackson), Panic of 1873 (U.S. Grant), Panic
of 1893 (Grover Cleveland) and if Mr. Obama wants to
go farther back than that, there was the Panic of
1819 (James Monroe). Some of the Great Panics
occurred in administrations of Democrats, but
President Obama could tie them to the Republicans,
anyway, since few would know the difference. Monroe
was even something called “Democrat-Republican.”
Anything to keep the subject on George W. Bush.
The biggest gaffe this week in Charlotte was
committed by whoever, probably Mr. Obama himself,
thought it would be a nifty idea to invite Bill
Clinton to make the nominating speech. Barack Obama
reckons himself to be the greatest orator since
Demosthenes (and probably better even than the
honey-tongued Greek), but Bill Clinton will remind
the convention of happier days than these. Bubba had
his faults, but better a loose zipper than a tight
economy. His speech, which will likely be all about
Bubba, will be the only wow! moment of the week.
Bubba has occasionally been the target of the Gaffe
Patrol himself. Only this week, New Yorker magazine
recalls that he is said to have once remarked to
Teddy Kennedy that “only a few years ago [Barack
Obama] would have been the guy carrying our bags.”
This is only history, as Bubba’s generation lived
it, but a remark like that could get a Republican
pol neutered for life.
You can’t blame the Democrats for trying to change
the conversation to George W., or even to Herbert
Hoover and Grover Cleveland, come to that. You never
want to talk about rope, as FDR reminded us, in the
home of a man recently on the gallows. Barack Obama
thinks he can wax golden on any subject, but he
knows to keep some things out of the message.
He
can unpack those famous Corinthian columns of
plaster of Paris that he used as backdrop in Denver,
but he doesn’t want to talk about the Barack Obama
of 2008, The man of hope and change is finally
recognized as a delusion, a national hallucination
made up of fog, mist and swamp gas. We’re all awake
now.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.