AP Photo Fourth Estate Trump’s Fatal Gaffe Ain’t Coming. Just Ask Joe Biden.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer.

With pencils sharpened and notebooks opened, the political press corps will sit eagerly Wednesday night to sift through every moment in the Republican presidential debate for evidence of a campaign-ending gaffe by one of the candidates. Special attention will be paid to front-runner Donald Trump, who has been setting the press corps’ hair on fire with his incendiary comments about John McCain’s war record, Megyn Kelly’s journalism, Mexican “rapists and murderers,” African-American kids who “have no spirit,” Carly Fiorina’s face and more.

Yet if reporters succeed in catching Trump or one of the other candidates in a horrible mistake or breaching good manners, don’t hold your breath for it to change the course of the campaign. After all, the frequent slips of the tongue, loopy metaphors and memory lapses of the current resident of the Naval Observatory, Vice President Joe Biden, show us all the limits of the political gaffe. The upward progress of Biden’s political career indicates our tendency to overestimate the impact that stupid statements have on a politician’s fortunes. He also indicates that other politicians might similarly loosen their tongues without fear of ostracism. Maybe we need more straight-talking politicians, rather than fewer?


Biden’s mouth stamps out gaffes like pennies at the U.S. Mint. Over recent years he’s become so prolific on this score that no single publication has been able to keep pace with his multitude of gaffes. Slate, the New Yorker, Washington Post, MSNBC, the New York Post, Fox News, Time, Newsmax, POLITICO, Newsbusters, the Daily Beast, Boston.com, the Los Angeles Times, the Los Angeles Times again, National Journal, Foreign Policy, National Review, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Newsweek, Newsweek again, the International Business Times, Reason, and others have all labored to document, compile and analyze his Bidenisms.

Does Biden’s mouth have too distant a relationship with his brain? Or is his mouth his brain? This debate, which hangs over each new Bidenism like morning fog, fades in short order as his apologists explain that “It’s just Joe being Joe,” freeing him to gaffe and gaffe again. Now, late-night comics are eagerly awaiting the idea of him leaping into the presidential race, where frequent stump appearances would only exacerbate his foot-in-mouth problem.

Everybody has a favorite Bidenism, the best known one being, perhaps, his quip from 2007, when he called Barack Obama “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Others tout the moment from the 2007 campaign trail, when Biden plugged Pennsylvania Democrat John Callahan for a seat in the U.S. Senate when Callahan was actually running for the House. To an assemblage of donors in 2012, Biden said, “You all look dull as hell, I might add. The dullest audience I have ever spoken to.” In early 2015, Biden bizarrely boasted of his “great relationship” with Somali cab drivers in Wilmington, Delaware, his hometown. In 2014, he called unscrupulous lenders “Shylocks,” thereby enraging the Anti-Defamation League. My favorite Bidenism came in 2008 at a Missouri campaign event, where Joe called out from the podium to state Sen. Chuck Graham, “Stand up, Chuck, let ’em see ya!” Graham, who uses a wheelchair, declined the command.

Yet a thorough review of the political record shows that Biden, like Trump, appears to have paid no political price for his gaffes. Biden issues foreign policy gaffes with impunity, last year talking trash about U.S. allies Turkey and United Arab Emirates. He drops the occasional double-entendre, saying in 2012, “I promise you, the president has a big stick.” He constructs giant non sequiturs in a stream-of-conscious manner that makes James Joyce look like a documentarian. “I would argue, since 1994 with the Gingrich revolution, just take a look at Iraq, Venezuela, Katrina, what’s gone down at Virginia Tech, Darfur, Imus,” Biden said in 2007. “Take a look. This didn’t happen accidentally, all these things.”

Devotees of the gaffe-as-fatal-flaw theory will counter with the historical examples in which a gaffe or other verbal miscue sank a campaign: George Romney being “brainwashed“ on Vietnam; Edmund Muskie’s “crying“ episode in New Hampshire after his wife’s reputation was attacked; Michael Dukakis’ flat response when asked if he would support the death penalty should his wife be raped and murdered; Gerald Ford’s assertion that there was no “Soviet domination of Eastern Europe.” But it’s a mistake to automatically attribute these candidates’ failures to single blunders. Consider, for example, the fact that George Romney remained a viable candidate for six months after making the “brainwashing” comment. Muskie’s tears, it has been asserted, proved him to be too emotional to serve as president, thereby derailing his 1972 presidential campaign. But Muskie went on to win the New Hampshire primary after the alleged weeping. He was bested by George McGovern in the long run because McGovern ran a smarter campaign, not because he teared up.

For the purpose of argument, let’s say Muskie’s excessive emotion did cost him the nomination, that had he been more stoic about the ugly comments slung at his wife he might have become his party’s nominee. But by that logic, Dukakis did the smarter thing by remaining impassive when asked about his wife’s hypothetical rape and murder. But that’s not how the press interpreted Dukakis’ response. Where Muskie’s surplus of emotion scuttled him, Dukakis’ lack of emotion was his disqualifier.

In the canon of political bloopers, no officeholder (outside of Dan Quayle, of course) has ever uttered anything as self-destructive as Barack Obama did on April 2008, when he called the working class “bitter” and accused it of clinging “to guns or religion.” And yet after doing so, Obama clobbered both Hillary Clinton and John McCain.

The gaffe problem—if it exists—exists mostly in the mind of the press. While it’s the duty of political journalists to sift a candidate’s comments for the stupid and the embarrassing and then showcase it, reporters have oversubscribed to the notion that gaffes destroy on contact.

As Trump and Biden have shown recently, the gaffe has limited power to ruin the stubborn candidate. The gaffe is a snake, for sure. And it bites. But its bite contains no venom.

That’s good news for the 11 candidates who will take the CNN stage Wednesday night at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. And, come to think of it, perhaps it’s a fitting setting: Ronald Reagan was the king of gaffes, long before Joe Biden arrived on the scene, and he made it all the way to the White House.

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I did it! I did it! I wrote a complete column about gaffes without citing Michael Kinsley’s famous piece on Washington gaffes! But duty demands that I link to it. Send your best links via email to [email protected]. All the best gaffers subscribe to my email alerts, follow my Twitter feed, and partake of my RSS feed.