WHILE everyone is having a good old laugh at poor Rick Perry, I'd like to congratulate my colleagues for pointing out that it's the sort of thing that can happen to anyone, though thankfully not usually quite so publicly.
Take a look at this poor fellow, for instance—surely a better example than my Johnson colleague's TV reporter, who doctors immediately commented seemed to have had a mini-stroke on air, and thus is not really a suitable candidate for even gentle mockery.
(The guy in my clip is the same one, by the way, who once claimed to have visited 57 states, and that his parents got together as a result of the mood generated by the civil-rights march from Selma, which happened more than three years after he was born.)
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Just what we need. Another blooper to add to the list of those few who "keep score." I am in agreement with those who say Gov. Perry should be excused a "brain burp." It can happen to anybody. For Gov. Perry, the problem may be that nobody was really shocked by the latest gaff. He had already set the bar low for his performance expectations.
I am among the group who think that in the case of forgetting which Department he wanted to eliminate, there is a strong possibility that he did not intend to follow up on the promise to cut government size in that way. If he really believed that the Environmental Protection Agency must go, he would have remembered that and the reasons why it must go.
As we see in President Obama's speech, he got confused in the wording, but did not lose the basic thought. He knew where he wanted to go with it. Perry didn't know where he wanted to go because he didn't really want to go there. He was pandering to a specific set of voters.
If you've ever seen an Obama press conference you'll notice he is pretty slow to respond. I assume it's because he's actually thinking about the issue. Perry messed up because didn't spend enough time memorizing that talking point. You'll never see Ron Paul do that because he's been saying the same thing throughout his career, and he truly believes in his stances. So there's a difference between fumbling your speech when you're trying to articulate the ideas that are in your head and when you are delivering a premeditated spiel and forget the last word.
This little snarky article seems below the Economist - I'd expect it out of redstate, but I'm not sure what narrative is being promoted. One thing to gaffe, quite another to pick the low-hanging fruit of criticism and publish it as news that would typically fit better on a pundit page.
@Neo Conservative & Tzimisces, Obama claimed he visited "57 states with one left to go." He didn't visit Guam or Puerto Rico or even Alaska or Hawaii.
Republicans get hammered for these kinds of gaffes much more than Democrats. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee's speech on North and South Vietnam and Congressman Hank Johnson's on Guam capsizing didn't get much coverage outside of conservative blogs.
Having said that, for anyone else to make Perry's mistake would've been forgivable. But this played right into the perception that he's a terrible speaker. He was the candidate least able to afford a gaffe like that.
The short answer is that people trust Democrats to have paid attention in school while we doubt the Edumacashun of republicans.
Democrats don't make anti intellectualism into a point of pride so peopl are more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Rick Perry goes down because he had the "I don't use big words or talk down to voters" thing going which set the bar low and then he undershot it.
I'm calling bulls**t on this. Neither Republicans or Democrats get a pass on gaffes. Want to see Democrats getting railed on, tune in Fox News. Flip over to MSNBC to get the opposite. What makes Perry's blunder worse than a mere gaffe is that it further exposes him as a complete fraud. If your whole campaign is centered on how government is cancer and you can't name three government agencies (any three!) then the charade is over.
If I want to see Democrats mocked for gaffes I have to tune into Fox News. If I want to see Republicans mocked for gaffes, I just have to turn on the TV.
Neo Conservative is right. The Democratic party is more of an academic meritocracy so there's an assumption of intelligence. The GOP is concerned more with ideological purity so there's no assumption of intelligence.
And a major point seems to be that the Economist is just as 'fair and balanced' as Fox News.
OK, so now we've spent 48 hours talking about nothing but how Perry's gaffe shouldn't be such a big deal.
I think it bears saying that just because I leave a comment here and there is no reason for everyone to start sending me money and having pizzas delivered.
What's your account number?
Are you a Nigerian prince or something?
Routing number 2273182535, account 263202115726.
Well, it doesn't really matter, because there are three reasons why Perry won't become President:
Barack Obama.
Mitt Romney, and -
Uh...well there's um, you know, it's right here in my notes, uh...I had it just a second ago...
Have to agree with New Conservative. The other things mentioned definitely qualify as gaffes, however, the US has 57 states and territories and I find it very easy to drop a clause, such as "and territories" not just in speech but also in writing. People do this all the time, usually we don't even notice and simply fill in the missing clause. I don't know what it is about the 57 states thing that makes people not do this and treat it as a big deal. Look at how much more publicity the 57 states gaffe received than the other two you mentioned.
I also have to agree generally that I think Perry's gaffe was overblown. People just do that kind of thing. The problem is that Perry is already on rough ground, he can't afford even small mistakes right now, he needs to be perfect to raise his numbers again. But people like to be able to hang things on events, rather than a series of small errors, so this event has become the issue to hang the narrative on, despite not being significantly larger than gaffes successful candidates like Obama made (I still don't think the 57 states thing qualifies as a gaffe, it just seems so natural to me I don't understand the attention it gets).
Indeed, Perry's little gaffe wasn't really one.
Hell, I don't really like Perry (for many reasons, and I certainly didn't vote him in to office), but even still... things like this happen to people. Surely there's far worse things going on in the debates than him being a bit forgetful under pressure. I mena, Cain's inadequacies were apparently ignored...
My favorite set of speech bloopers:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ux3DKxxFoM
It will be hard to top this.
Wow, not takig shots are your colleagues????
You mean he claimed to be in 57 party primaries.
Heaven forbid that the president actually pay attention to places like Puerto Rico and Guam. His only mistake was that he elevated the primaries in the various US territories to the level of state ones.