Romney just latest to trip over his tongue

Published 5:00 am Friday, September 21, 2012

As critics pummel Mitt Romney over his secretly recorded comments at a fundraiser, he can at least take comfort in this: he’s not the first.

Presidential campaign history overflows with candidates who tripped over their own loose tongues — some obscuring their actual meaning, others accidentally revealing it. Even a cursory statistical analysis shows that well over 47 percent of races for the White House have seen a candidate suffer self-inflicted wounds.

In Romney’s case, he has stood by his remarks, but nevertheless acknowledged he spoke inelegantly.

Here’s a list of verbal misfires under the pitiless glare of the national political stage:

Sen. John McCain, 2008: “The fundamentals of the economy are strong.”

This off-key attempt at reassurance, delivered in mid-September as Lehman Brothers was collapsing, helped seal the fate of a losing campaign.

Sen. John Kerry, 2004: “I actually did vote for the $87 billion, before I voted against it.”

The unfortunate comment about money to pay for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, made by Kerry in March during a college event in Pennsylvania, helped cement his reputation as an equivocating politician after President George W. Bush’s campaign exploited it in mocking television ads.

President George H.W. Bush, 1992: “Message: I care.”

Stung by accusations that he was disconnected from the economic struggles of average Americans, Bush fueled them by giving New Hampshire voters this piece of political stage direction. Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid” campaign proved resonant enough to withstand publication of a 1970 letter in which he acknowledged having avoided fighting in Vietnam without resisting the draft “to preserve my political viability.”

Gov. Michael Dukakis, 1988: “I think you know that I’ve opposed the death penalty during all of my life.”

This emotionless response, to a debate question whose hypothetical premise involved the rape and murder of his wife, fixed Dukakis’ image as a governmental technocrat at odds with most Americans on the high-voltage issue of crime and punishment.

Walter Mondale, 1984: “Mr. Reagan will raise taxes and so will I. He won’t tell you. I just did.”

Intending to impress with candor, Mondale handed the Republican incumbent, Ronald Reagan, a weapon with this stunner in his speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination. Reagan’s celebration of “Morning in America” and warnings against tax-and-spend liberalism produced a landslide.

President Gerald Ford, 1976: “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

The misstatement, intended to signal solidarity with those under the Soviet Union’s thumb, allowed Carter to question the incumbent’s foreign policy acumen. Carter won a close race despite his own awkward confession to Playboy magazine that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times.”

George W. Romney, 1968: “When I came back from Vietnam I just had the greatest brainwashing anybody can get.”

This summer 1967 remark, about Romney’s conversations with U.S. diplomats and military leaders on the war in Southeast Asia, led to the collapse of his challenge to Richard M. Nixon for the Republican nomination. It also prompted this lacerating response from the Democratic candidate Eugene McCarthy: “A light rinse would have been sufficient.”