Gaffe watch

CNN was watching for a Biden gaffe. I was watching for gaffes from all the candidates.

No surprise: everyone makes verbal stumbles.Kamila Harris and Cory Booker made bigger ones and I have them on tape. 

But Biden's headlined the CNN news.

Google search results

The Saturday evening CNN news show presented a six second clip of Biden making a slip of the tongue. Speaking rapidly to two thousand people at the New Hampshire Democratic Convention, he said "Donald Hump" then immediately corrected it, adding "Freudian slip." He said it, caught it, and he made a clever joke of it.

That is the news. Not that Biden was well received, and not the content of what he said at the convention.

I am attending a flurry of events in New Hampshire, looking at candidate presentations, and especially in the Biden events, I am looking for confirmation or denial of whether he is up to the job of campaigning against Trump, winning, and then being a great president. I was looking for slips, and like the regular news media, I noticed this one, because it was funny, because the audience noticed it, and because of the quick lighthearted recovery.

I also was looking for signs of frailty, at the convention speech and in the day prior, at a Biden Town Hall type event in Laconia, New Hampshire, where I got to early so I could sit right up front. About 300 enthusiastic people squeezed into an historic mill, in a room that would accommodate 200. 

He bounded in to the meeting. He stood erect, he walked around and didn't use the teleprompter that was set up in front of him. He spoke fluently with characteristic earnestness about the responsibility of men to respect women. "No means no," he said. And it means "no" if the woman is inebriated then she cannot say yes, affirmatively. Men need to learn to respect women.  We need to change the culture, Biden said.

He was loquacious in his answers--a pattern of all the presidential candidates. Biden had a 7 minute answer to an audience member who said that his cancer treatment went poorly.

Biden: "Donald Hump"

Booker gaffe. I watched Cory Booker do essentially the same thing at a Friday evening event, with an eleven minute answer to a question. In his final answer of the Town Hall Booker described going with others to Dulles Airport to greet Muslims coming to America, letting them know that Trump did not represent all Americans.

     ". . . at Dulles airport the first time there was a Muslim ban, it was so offensive to me that we were going to judge who would come into this country based upon religion, to demonize the entire thing, so I get to the concourse and I see hundreds and hundreds of Americans cheering every time a Muslim family coming from another country would come out of the gate, singing patriotic songs. I saw guys with yarmulkes on [unintelligible] cheering for Muslim families coming to this prison and I was so proud, this is what America looks like, so I go back to the Senate. . . "

There, in the ramble, readers notice it:  he substituted the word prison for country.  A few minutes prior he had been talking about criminal justice and prison reform, and just before this about marijuana sentencing. Prisons had been on his mind and the words were going very quickly.

Here is what we did not see in news stories: Cory Booker calls America a prison! Cory Booker cannot tell an airport from a jail cell! Cory Booker dementia advancing! Booker disassociating and lost!

Booker: "prison"

Harris gaffe. Kamala Harris spoke to about 400 people in an apple orchard fifteen miles outside of Manchester. Ten minutes into her talk she said that Trump policies were hurting Americans.

     ". . . He said he's going to take resources from our military families' schools to build a wall, which by the way will never be built. He came in with policies about putting babies in cages and separating families at the border. A trade deal, a so-called trade deal which has caused farmers, throughout our country, and I've been spending a lot of time in Ohio, farmers there are looking at bankruptcy, cause they got soybeans rotting in bins, because you see over a decade they built up a market to sell to China, which has now been cut off. . . ."

Notice the gaffe? She has not been spending time in Ohio, talking with soybean farmers. She has of course actually been in Iowa and that is where the soybean problem is.

Here is what we did not see:  Kamila Harris thumbs nose at Iowa! Kamila Harris lies about where she campaigns! Kamala Harris cannot tell Ohio from Iowa! Kamala Harris shows signs of former marijuana use and mental defect!

Verbal stumbles happen because candidates are talking a lot. 

If the news and punditry world wanted to write about verbal errors they would easily find examples of it from every candidate. But the story--the Biden "Sleepy Joe" meme-- is much bigger than the reality of Biden's actual verbal mis-cues.

The long term meaning of this is ominous for Biden. He will keep making errors because people who are speaking naturally and genuinely and persuasively are certain to make errors. Biden will make them just as Booker and Harris will make them. The idea that if Biden were simply more careful he can avoid them is an impossible goal. If a candidate talks, the candidate will make errors.

Harris: "Ohio"

In Biden's case, they will be perceived as evidence of unfitness. That is a problem for him and for Democrats. The meme is out there, and the Google search on Biden demonstrates that the story on Biden is his verbal slip and he is doomed to keep giving evidence.

It is unfair, but it is the reality I see on the ground, on television, and within Google algorithms.