James Geraghty notes the equivocation of the term "gaffe" in modern politics:
In that light, how should we assess President Obama's "the private sector is doing fine," "if you have a business, you didn't build that" and "our plan worked"? The argument from the president's defenders is that each one is literally true and only sounds odd to those who don't understand the context -- that the private sector is creating jobs while state and local governments cut back, the "that" refers to roads and bridges, not the business itself, and the plan refers to Bill Clinton's tax hikes, not Obama's enacted policies. The problem is that all of these explanations aren't as exculpatory as his fans think:
A) If 80,000 or so jobs per month -- not enough to keep up with workforce additions -- is your idea of "doing fine," you're setting the bar too low.
B) Even if President Obama was talking about "roads and bridges," business owners did indeed pay for that, through income taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, and business taxes.
C) Even if Obama meant Clinton's tax hikes when he said our plan "worked," he's crediting the Clinton tax hikes as the cause of the 1990s economic boom -- not the rise of the Internet in American life, the dot-com bubble, etc. "Our plan worked" contends we're just one big tax hike away from restoring 4 percent annual GDP growth. Except that the tax hikes were enacted in 1993, and the boom didn't start until 1996--1997.
The argument from Obama's critics would be that the "gaffes" aren't misstatements but signals of what Obama really thinks -- that the private sector's current growth rate really is "fine," that he thinks businessmen smugly give themselves too much credit for their success and not enough credit to government, and that tax hikes are good for the economy. Perhaps Republicans read too much into these remarks . . . but perhaps not.
Anyway, carping that the press makes a big deal out of Republican gaffes and ignores Democrat ones is an old, well-founded, and tired complaint. But what's striking is that the result of this culture within the press corps is that at least three of the highest figures in the Democratic party today are among those most prone to making statements that range from the bizarre to the outrageous to the unhinged . . . and they pay no discernible price for these habits. No matter what they say, the labels "dumb" or "foolish" never seem to stick to them.
As I said with respect to Nancy Pelosi's amazing caricature of Jews as chiefly motivated by their concerned about "ducats":
There might be something to Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. When you think of the insensitive things said by ranking Democrats such as Pelosi, Biden and Reid, you can't help but conclude that the whole party would be helped by culling out the dumbest ones.
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