WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — When Gary Johnson looked blankly at his questioner last week on “Morning Joe” and asked “And what is Aleppo?,” the Libertarian Party’s presidential nominee showed not only that he was not ready for prime time but that he couldn’t even handle a morning show.

As one commentator quipped, you could say the gaffe doomed his candidacy except that his third-party run was doomed from the get-go.

At any rate, it certainly eliminated any chance that Johnson would reach the 15% threshold in the polls to take part in the prime-time presidential debates and pretty much guaranteed this would be the last political campaign for the former New Mexico governor.

“ It remains to be seen how lasting the harm will be from Clinton’s gaffe. Her effort to “walk back” the comment narrowed the field of irredeemable deplorables to several million instead of tens of millions. ”

As a gaffe, it probably ranks with Rick Perry’s famous “Oops” comment, when his inability to remember the third federal department he wanted to close effectively ended his own long-shot candidacy in 2012.

In a presidential campaign riddled with incompetence and unlikable candidates, however, it was not long before a much bigger gaffe took center stage: Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s castigation of half of the supporters for her Republican rival Donald Trump as a “basket of deplorables.”

“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?” she said to laughter at a New York fundraiser that donors paid up to $250,000 to attend. “The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that.”

Not only are the words offensive, but the disdain in her voice and body language consigned these millions of deplorables to a place beyond the pale of civilization.

It recalled the disdain she showed for “super-predators” in a 1996 speech she gave during her husband’s re-election campaign, when, still speaking with an Arkansas drawl, she said of these mostly African-American youths, “first, we have to bring them to heel.” Someone might have put her in a basket of deplorables for that remark.

In this new case, Hillary Clinton, who aspires to be president of all Americans and whose campaign slogan suggests inclusion, lumped together tens of millions of voters — Trump’s support is polling in the low- to mid-40s — she deemed to be “irredeemable,” adding “but thankfully they are not America.”

Commentators of all political stripes were quick to compare this new gaffe with the famous 47% remark by the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, when he told a private gathering of wealthy donors that nearly half of Americans were happy to live on government handouts and would vote Democratic for that reason.

That gaffe was widely considered to have inflicted fatal damage on Romney’s campaign to deny Barack Obama a second term.

It remains to be seen how lasting the harm will be from Clinton’s new gaffe. Her half-hearted effort to “walk back” the comment — she conceded she should have said “some” of Trump’s supporters instead of “half” — narrowed the field of irredeemable deplorables to several million instead of tens of millions.

Donald Trump supporter punches protester at rally

Trump pounced on Clinton’s statement, tweeting: “Wow, Hillary Clinton was SO INSULTING to my supporters, millions of amazing, hard working people. I think it will cost her at the Polls!”

He followed this up with extended remarks at his rallies, a call for Clinton to retract the remark and apologize, and a campaign ad featuring a clip of the remarks.

The very oddity of the phrase, “basket of deplorables,” sets this gaffe apart from a slip of the tongue, because it is obviously crafted out of a noun that doesn’t exist and a set of “baskets” to sort voters into.

In a way, it affirms Trump’s charge that Clinton doesn’t see voters such as African-Americans as people but only as votes — perhaps with a basket of their own to make the triage simpler.

In her speech Sept. 9, Clinton put the remaining half of Trump supporters into “that other basket” of “people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change.”

As a Wall Street Journal editorial noted, this is nearly as insulting as her description of the first basket.

“So she thinks half of Mr. Trump’s voters are loathsome bigots and the other half are losers and dupes who deserve Democratic pity,” the Journal’s editorial concluded.

Who talks about baskets of people anyway?

In its awkwardness, this phrase is reminiscent of Romney’s “binders full of women” or Al Gore’s mythical “lockbox” in his first debate in 2000 against George W. Bush, where the unsuccessful Democratic nominee was going to put Social Security safely under lock and key.

A single gaffe may not lose an election for a candidate, but it is inescapably true that those who utter monumental gaffes — such as Gore, Romney, Perry and now, perhaps, Clinton — don’t often emerge as winners.