There's no shortage of work here at gaffe tracking central.
If there’s any doubt about the effectiveness of Barack Obama’s response team — and especially their assertiveness against sloppy mainstream media reporting — it should be laid to rest by their reaction to a rookie reporter foul up by veteran Washington Post columnist Harold Meyerson. In an otherwise lukewarmly interesting take on the sometimes uneasy alliance between main street and Wall Street Dems, Meyerson said that Obama had voted for the punitive bankruptcy bill in 2005.
Ah, not true at all, said the fast-to-the-draw Obama folks who, at least in New England, were enjoying a moment of glory with a huge rally in Boston yesterday as Obama secured the endorsement of Massachusetts Gov. Duval Patrick.
The campaign wasted no time in responding and hit back with a statement and Senate links (here and here) showing that not only had Obama voted against the bill but spoke at rather forcefully against it.
The Obama response folks must have fallen off their chairs when word came out about Patrick's predecessor, Republican presidential wannabe Mitt “You say Osama, I say Obama” Romney. The former attendence-challenged Governor laid a painful rhetorical egg yesterday in South Carolina. The Mittster is setting new standards of unintentional campaign stand up comedy. It’s almost freakish when you would think that Romney — who saw his father George Romney deleted from the 1968 campaign after he claimed to have been ‘brainwashed’ by the Pentagon establishment about military progress in Vietnam — would be slightly aware of the consequences when one is no longer speaking in the privacy of a corporate boardroom.
In serious damage control mode, the Romney campaign said their guy “misspoke” but according to the Associated Press report, it was a serious case of misspeaking while he was attacking the Dems for being soft on terrorism. “Actually, just look at what Osam — Barack Obama — said just yesterday,” Romney said in Greenville, S.C. Tuesday. “Barack Obama, calling on radicals, jihadists of all different types, to come together in Iraq. That is the battlefield. ... It’s almost as if the Democratic contenders for president are living in fantasyland. Their idea for jihad is to retreat, and their idea for the economy is to also retreat. And in my view, both efforts are wrongheaded.”
Talk about mixing your metaphors and enemies. No wonder the campaign made Romney very unavailable for further comment.
In years to come, perhaps pundits and medical doctors will cite a new campaign malady in honor of Mitt Romney. Perhaps they will call Political Attention Deficit Disorder.
Speaking of the mainstream media, Republican Ron Paul got some love from Howard Fineman of Newsweek. Fineman sort of fancied Paul’s chances to muck up the primary scrum here among the GOPers. Me thinks that Fineman may not be far off the mark because I’ve never seen such a combination of discord and confusion among Republican voters (read here) as I have in the 2008 edition of the primary circus here.
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