Top-Five Gaffes of Campaign 2008

by Mark Silva

It could have been a certain candidate for vice president's inability to name any newspapers that she reads. Or it could have been those thousands of dollars of campaign-purchased designer-wear that the self-styled "soccer mom'' from Alaska wore on the campaign trail.

It could have been a winning candidate for president's portrayal of working class voters as "bitter,'' or the suggestion of this African-American candidate this his own beloved grandmother was "a typical white person.''

It could have been the Republican presidential nominee's admission, many months before claiming the party's nomination, that "the issue of economics is something that I've never really understood as well as I should,'' or his sudden "suspension'' of his campaign late in the contest to return to Washington to attend to an economic meltdown. David Letterman said it didn't meet "the smell test.''

It could have been the once-leading Democratic candidate's recollection of her landing in Bosnia under "sniper fire.'' Anyone can get tired campaigning late at night, her husband, the former president explained - raising certain questions about the way that "3 am telephone call'' might be handled at the White House.

Or perhaps it was the Beverly Hills reunion that a former presidential hopeful and former nominee for vice president had with the woman, a former campaign aide, with whom he had an affair while his wife was battling cancer.

Somewhere along the road to the White House, someone committed the "gaffe of the year'' in the campaign just concluded.

For the sake of the campaign cycle, we'll accept an extended period of time for that "year'' under consideration - reaching back to, say, April of 2007, when the eventual Republican nominee responded to a voter's question about sending "an airmail message'' to Iran with a whimsical recital of the Beach Boys' Barbara Ann... "Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb...''

And we'll ask you, in the remaining days of this tumultuous year, to tell us how you rank the Top Five Gaffes of the Year. We offer these five for your consideration, and welcome your suggestions for any others, here in the Swamp. See our candidates below the fold, rank them, feel free to offer your own alternatives and come back on New Year's Day for a read-out on the year's rankings.

-- Republican Sen. John McCain's sudden "suspension'' of his presidential campaign and his call for a postponement of the premier campaign debate that week in late September so that he could return to Washington to work on an economic bailout might have appeared more serious if he hadn't stopped for a television news interview along the way, and if he hadn't once, many months ago, admitted how little he really knows about the economy.

"You don't suspend your campaign,'' David Letterman said of the guest who cancelled his appearance on the late-night TV circuit to return to Washington. "This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves." He joked of the 72-year old senior senator from Arizona: "I think someone's putting something in his Metamucil."

The economic meltdown of 2008 was contributing to the meltdown of McCain's own final presidential campaign. It was McCain, speaking of his need to rely on strong advisers, who had said, while campaigning in New Hampshire in December 2007: "The issue of economics is something that I've never really understood as well as I should. I understand the basics, the fundamentals, the vision, all that kind of stuff.''

Voter concern about the economy already had trumped concern about the war in Iraq. Which was convenient for McCain, who supported the unpopular war effort there and responded once in jest to a question about bombing Iran.

It was April 2007 in Murrells Inlet, S.C., where a man on the campaign trail stood to ask McCain: ""How many times do we have to prove that these people are blowing up people now, nevermind if they get a nuclear weapon, when do we send 'em an airmail message to Tehran?"

"That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran," McCain replied in jest, softly singling, 'Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah ..."

* * * *

-- "I remember landing under sniper fire,'' Sen. Hillary Clinton said last spring of her visit to Bosnia several years before. "There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

The only problem was the newsreel footage of that 1996 landing replayed in the following days, footage showing the former first lady stepping off a plane with smiles and waves and a ceremonial greeting on the tarmac - and no sign of any snipers, or any threat whatsoever.
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Clinton conceded that she had made "a misstatement.''

Her husband, former President Bill Clinton, tried to downplay the misstatement as a matter of candidate fatigue. "Some of them, when they're 60, they'll forget something when they're tired at 11 o'clock at night, too,'' Bill Clinton said of his wife's remarks.

That could have offered a certain comfort if Hillary Clinton weren't campaigning as the one ready to answer that emergency call at the White House. In the long run, however, neither the candidate's recollection of sniper fire nor her campaign commercials are likely to stand in the way of her confirmation as secretary of state in the administration of President-elect Barack Obama.

* * * *

--- April was a big month on the campaign trail.

Speaking at a closed-door campaign fundraiser in San Francisco, Democrat Barack Obama told supporters that he understands why some working-class voters become frustrated and vote on single issues.

"It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations," he had said, in an address revealed in bits and pieces later by The Huffington Post.

Obama, later conceding that he had chosen his words poorly, insisted that he was making a valid point: "I said something that everybody knows is true, which is that there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my hometown in Illinois, who are bitter,'' Obama said in Muncie, Ind. "They are angry. They feel like they've been left behind. They feel like nobody is paying attention to what they're going through.

"So, I said, well you know, when you're bitter, you turn to what you can count on,'' Obama said today. "Some people, you know, they vote about guns, or they take comfort in their faith, and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country, or they get frustrated about, you know, how things are changing.''

For all the trouble that this statement was supposed to cause Obama's campaign, however, the junior senator from Illinois went on to carry Pennsylvania, where Republicans had turned these "bitter'' words against him, and even carried Indiana.

It wasn't Obama's own words, so much as the inflammatory words of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago, which had appeared to present an even bigger problem for Obama. After initially claiming that he hadn't heard the worst of the words that Wright had delivered from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama finally severed his connection with the church.

In the process, Obama also delivered one of the signal speeches of his campaign, traveling to Philadelphia to make an appeal for racial harmony, a call for "a more perfect union." And in the process, he conceded that his own white grandmother had shown some reticence at times about unknown black men.

Asked about that comment in a talk with Sports Radio 610, WIP, of Philadelphia, Obama said: "The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. But she is a typical white person. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know. . .there's a reaction in her that doesn't go away and it comes out in the wrong way."

It's a measure, perhaps, of how much racial progress the nation has made that neither the Rev. Wright nor any ill-chosen words about a beloved grandmother who passed away near the end of Obama's campaign would stand in the way of the election of the first African-American president.

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--- "When it comes to establishing your world view,'' CBS' Katie Couric asked Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican nominee for vice president, ""I was curious, what newspapers and magazines did you regularly read before you were tapped for this to stay informed and to understand the world?''

""I've read most of them, again with a great appreciation for the press, for the media,'' Palin said.

"What, specifically?'' Couric asked.

"Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me all these years.''

"Can you name a few?''

"I have a vast variety of sources where we get our news, too,'' Palin replied. "Alaska isn't a foreign country, where it's kind of suggested, 'wow, how could you keep in touch with what the rest of Washington, D.C., may be thinking when you live up there in Alaska?' Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.''

For all the appeal that Palin brought to McCain's campaign, rallying crowds with her "Drill, Baby, Drill'' call for more oil exploration and her "lipstick'' on a "pit-bull'' fighting zeal, the series of conversations that Palin had with Couric and other national media interviewers contributed to an unraveling of the McCain campaign's claim that this was a ticket offering deep experience and wisdom to boot.

* * * *

-- John Edwards' affair already was history, and so was his campaign.

Yet, when the former senator from North Carolina who served as the Democratic Party's vice presidential nominee in 2004 and was seeking the presidential nomination again in 2008 was spotted at the Beverly Hills Hilton last summer visiting Rielle Hunter he invited something of a Gary Hart "follow me'' pursuit of the story of his affair with Hunter.

Edwards, who had campaigned twice with an self-made aura of integrity, had to concede in an interview with ABC News that he had had an affair with the woman whom he had met in New York in 2006 and hired as a campaign videographer. He said his wife, Elizabeth, and others in his family became aware of the affair in 2006 - and he said his wife's cancer had been in remission when he began the affair.

An associate of Edwards later had to explain that a $14,000 payment to Edwards' onetime mistress was for left-over videotapes, not hush money. She had been paid $100,000 for the videos, known as "Web-isodes.'' One of them featured Edwards talking about "responsibility... about basic human morality.''