Kudos to Slate’s Dave Weigel for coining a useful new phrase—the “magic word gaffe”—in the jargon of contemporary American politics. He did so in explaining how and why conservative commentators have spent much of the past week flogging their misinterpretation (to put it charitably) of Pres. Obama’s “…if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that…” statement at a campaign rally. (The “that” Obama was pretty clearly referring to was the “roads and bridges” in his previous sentence.)
“Call it a magic word gaffe–a statement that reveals not what a politician believes, but what you already feared, in your bone marrow, that a politician believes.”
As Ed Kilgore astutely notes, it’s precisely because this magic word gaffe of Obama’s is (for conservatives) “what you already feared, in your bone marrow”, that it’s unlikely to have a lasting impact in this campaign:
“The problem with this stuff, of course, is that the low-information swing voters who will decide the present election will require an awful lot of education to understand the magic word gaffes. They haven’t marinated their brains with Beckian revisionist history and don’t run around pasting “Breitbart Is Here!” posters on telephone poles. Many of them, in fact, probably don’t own businesses and don’t much think of their own bosses–much less the Mitt Romneys of the world–as heroic figures.”
Already, Obama’s “magic word gaffe” is being buried as a story by the Aurora massacre. (Starting Friday, it’ll be buried by coverage of the Summer Olympics.) And it’s a tough story to “unbury”*.
The story that’s likely to keep popping up in the presidential campaign is the story about Mitt Romney’s business and financial dealings, because between the SEC filings and the IRS tax forms, there’s a lot of paper on which to build the story.
* “Remember that thing he said in that speech a few weeks ago….”
“Which thing in which speech?”
“You know, the thing about businesses not building things on their own in that speech he gave somewhere in one of the swing states….”
“No, not really. Hey, did you see the game last night?”
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
