As critics pummel Mitt Romney over his secretly recorded comments at a fundraiser, he can at least take comfort in this: He’s not the first.
Presidential campaign history overflows with candidates who tripped over their own loose tongues — some obscuring their actual meaning, others accidentally revealing it. Even a cursory statistical analysis shows that well over 47 percent of races for the White House have seen a candidate suffer self-inflicted wounds.
In Romney’s case, he has stood by his remarks but nevertheless acknowledged he spoke inelegantly. Consider what follows a list of the top verbal misfires on national political stage.
Sen. John McCain, 2008: “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.”
This off-key attempt at reassurance, delivered in mid-September as Lehman Brothers was collapsing, helped seal the fate of a losing campaign. The beneficiary was Barack Obama, who had endured his own embarrassment over a secretly recorded remark to donors that some working-class voters “cling to their guns or religion” as reasons to support Republicans.
Sen. John Kerry, 2004: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.”
The unfortunate comment about money to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, made by Kerry in March, helped cement his reputation as an equivocating politician after President George W. Bush’s campaign exploited it in mocking television ads.
Vice President Al Gore, 2000: “I took the initiative in creating the Internet.”
Critics seized on this clumsy assertion, made during a March 1999 CNN interview, to lampoon Gore as a brazen embellisher taking credit for the innovation. The attacks later helped George W. Bush’s campaign to influence media post-mortems after a fall 2000 debate in which Gore made minor misstatements. Bush moved into the White House the next January.
President Bill Clinton, 1996: “You think I raised your taxes too much. It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much, too.”
With that acknowledgment at a 1995 Houston fundraiser, Clinton roiled Democrats, Republicans and his own aides. He won re-election anyway, in part by linking his Republican opponent, Bob Dole, to Speaker Newt Gingrich, who had predicted his agenda would cause the existing structure of Medicare to “wither on the vine.”
President George Bush, 1992: “Message: I care.”
Stung by accusations that he was disconnected from the economic struggles of average Americans, Bush fueled them by giving New Hampshire voters this piece of political stage direction. Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” campaign proved resonant enough to withstand publication of a 1970 letter in which he acknowledged having avoided fighting in Vietnam without resisting the draft “to preserve my political viability.”
Walter Mondale, 1984: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”
Mondale handed the Republican incumbent, Ronald Reagan, a weapon with this stunner in his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. Reagan’s celebration of “Morning in America” and warnings against tax-and-spend liberalism produced a landslide — despite his shaky debate performances.
Ronald Reagan, 1980: “Approximately 80 percent of our air pollution stems from hydrocarbons released by vegetation.”
Democrats used this so-called killer trees statement to cast Reagan as an extremist, retired actor. But economic conditions and the plight of U.S. hostages in Iran created such an appetite for change that Reagan swept to victory after dismissing a debate attack from President Jimmy Carter with the rejoinder, “There you go again.”
President Gerald Ford, 1976: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”
The misstatement, intended to signal solidarity with those under the Soviet Union’s thumb, allowed Carter to question the incumbent’s foreign policy acumen. Carter won a close race despite his own awkward confession to Playboy magazine that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times.”
