WASHINGTON — If you’re an aspiring presidential candidate, says professional crisis manager Eric Dezenhall, right now is “a great time to take a pratfall because it’s so far away from anything major.”
That’s a good thing because many of the candidates’ feet have been sliding out from under them.
The first six weeks of 2015 have featured mangled messages, snappishness, a bad hire and other flubs from the Republicans who would be president.
It’s to be expected in the earliest stages of a campaign with many potential candidates who haven’t done this before.
In recent days:
• Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush cut loose a new hire with a history of inappropriate comments about women, gays and blacks.
• New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul struggled to strike the right tone on whether parents should have to vaccinate their children.
• Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker caught flak for ducking questions and picking a fight with the revered University of Wisconsin.
It’s part of the long and brutal learning curve for a presidential race, where even seasoned politicians find the scrutiny more intense than for lesser offices.
Dezenhall calls this the season of “gaffe congestion” for would-be candidates and says 20 months out from Election Day 2016 is a good time to get them over with.
In an earlier time, none of this recent drama would have been much more than a paragraph in the saga that is a presidential race.
“Now, thanks to Twitter and the immediacy of political commentary, mistakes are much more painful,” says Ari Fleischer, a communications consultant who was President George W. Bush’s press secretary.
Still, he says, the best candidates will learn quickly.
Jeb Bush’s team probably will check out future job applicants more carefully. A less bombastic Christie was back working in Iowa not long after snapping at reporters in London.
“Much of what’s happening right now won’t be remembered a year from now or in a general election,” says Stephanie Cutter, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns for Barack Obama and John Kerry.
For now, Democrats can sit back because expected candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton has the experience of the 2008 Democratic primaries on her résumé and is expected to face little primary opposition. But Fleischer said even Clinton will have an adjustment to make if she jumps back into the presidential mosh pit after eight years of “the paid speaker’s life, which is scrutiny-free, and the charmed life of a secretary of state, where you’re not covered in the same way you are in political campaigns.”
