Terry Cowgill

All Gaffing Aside

April 19, 2008 on 6:53 am | In Main, Race for Prez |

When he appeared before a San Francisco audience earlier this month and characterized rural Pennsylvanians as xenophobic, gun loving bigots, Obama had what I would call a Kinsley moment. The Democratic frontrunner said that’s not what he meant. He had merely misspoken and “mangled” his words. A gaffe, in other words.

Last year, not long after Sen. Joe Biden called Obama “clean and articulate,” Michael Kinsley defined a gaffe brilliantly:

[It’s] when a politician tells the truth — or more precisely, when he or she accidentally reveals something truthful about what is going on in his or her head. A gaffe is what happens when the spin breaks down.

That’s precisely why I (as a journalist) love gaffes. Not because they make the candidate look foolish, as Obama appears now to millions of people, but because gaffes are awkward moments when all the carefully scripted comments and loyal spin completely evaporate in the face of spontaneous ruminations that offer us a window into the candidate’s mind. Sort of like a Shakespearean aside.

And this is not to condemn only those on the left who engage in such unintentional truth-telling. I remember well when President Bush during a prime time news conference in 2004 suggested his war in Iraq was justified because “freedom is the Almighty’s gift to every man and woman in this world.”

Say what? I remember thinking at the time that he came perilously close to saying he sent troops to liberate Iraq because it was God’s will. The president denied it, but all the spin in the world could not change what he said. I really think that’s what he believes — in which case it’s truly frightening.

No, Obama’s comments are not frightening but, sadly, they are typical of elitists who simply do not understand what makes the great masses tick. Obama and the liberal choir he addressed in San Francisco think there has to be a logical reason why so many rustics “cling to guns and religion,” so they attempt to paint them as ignorant victims of Republican economic policies. Brilliant reasoning, eh? It gets a jab in at both the GOP and the Reagan Dems at the same time.

The question for Dems if they nominate Obama is whether he will have more Kinsley moments that the Republicans can exploit. I suspect he will. Too often Democratic presidential nominees come across as out-of touch coastal elitists (Dukakis, Gore, Kerry) who are clueless about the great unwashed in flyover country. Obama is already on his way to experiencing the same fate.

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As to the great Wednesday night debate, the blogosphere has been ablaze with criticism of the peformance of the two ABC moderators, George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson. Here’s my quick take on it:

Sure, on one level there were too few questions of any policy substance. But in this kind of race, I don’t really have problems with that approach. For one, there are few policy differences separating Hillary and Obama, so what else is there to talk about but flag pins and 60s radicals?

Second, the American people talk a good game about wanting substance in these debates, but the reality is if George and Charlie had asked one question after another on healthcare and entitlement reform, millions of TVs across America would have gone black or switched to the Red Sox-Yankees showdown. There is a reason why this was the highest rated presidential debate so far.

And I guess I’m part of the problem, too. If I were to write a treatise in this space on the gold standard, you (and I) would need a refresher course in macroeconomics and a couple of shots of espresso to get through it. But start talking Anna Nicole Smith and we all perk right up.

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Oh, and speaking of espresso, yesterday (on its first day open for business) I went into the new Dunkin Donuts in Canaan. It’s a sort of a Dunkin Donuts lite — really not much more than a kiosk in the corner of the Citgo Mart. But they have the full array of coffee, donuts, muffins, bagels, flatbread sandwiches and personal pizzas.

I had a small cappacino for $2.29, a little more than half the price of Starbucks but well more than half as good. Alas, my waistline does not need a jelly cruller, so I passed up on anything to eat — much to the chagrin of the preppy-looking Polo-shirt-wearing blond woman who took my order and for whom I took to be the franchisee. A Starbucks bear claw, on the other hand, I would not resist.