Joe Biden’s coal-fired gaffe machine

It’s an election year and the gaffe olympics  — the least appealing portion of any campaign – are in full swing.

Howlers, idiocies, and self-contradictions will dominate the political discussion for the next six weeks, with Friday night’s debate no doubt providing plenty of each from John McCain and Barack Obama.

Sure, there will be bombshells this year that reshape the race (e.g. the financial sector of the American economy smoldering like burnt bacon in a pan) just as there have been in the past (e.g. the revelation of George W. Bush’s youthful drunken driving or Osama bid Laden’s endorsement of John Kerry).

 

But it is gaffes that drive the daily news cycle here in the final six weeks of the contest and it is gaffes that voters talk about.

Campaigns work so hard to be boring that the only thing remaining for bleary-eyed reporters to talk about is when candidates have a lapse. And this year has seen a bumper crop.

But there are gaffes that matter and gaffes that don’t.

Visiting the Middle East, McCain lost track of whether it was Sunni or Shia Muslims training with al Queda to kill our soldiers. Stumping in Oregon, Obama said there were 57 states in the Union.

McCain’s Muslim muddle reinforced to Democrats what they already believed – that McCain doesn’t give a fig about other cultures and is a bit dotty.

Obama’s lapse on American geography reinforced to Republicans what they already believed – that Obama is a citizen of the world before a citizen of the U-S of A.

The stories emerge and are swept away just as quickly, doing little to change the minds of any persuadable voters. Even so, packs of reporters run after the ball like players in a fourth-grade soccer match.

Back and forth goes the call in newsrooms:

“Did you hear that McCain’s campaign manager’s firm still does work for Fannie Mae? He said he severed all ties months earlier!”

“Did you see that Joe Biden didn’t know who was president when the stock market crashed in 1929 or when television was invented?”

These things are revealing to reporters, but not to people who have more pressing concerns in their lives. They don’t care who Rick Davis is, nor are they very interested in the history of the Great Depression. They are worried about avoiding the next one.

The gaffes that do matter reveal something previously unknown about a candidate or change the widely accepted view of him or her.

McCain ducking a question on how many houses he owns brought the notion of a gruff, old war hero into conflict with the picture of a guy who has lived lavishly because of his wife’s family beer business.

Barack Obama apologizing in San Francisco for having to pander to the gun-toting, Bible thumpers in small-town Pennsylvania jolted people out of the notion that Obama was really a post-partisan healer of old divides.

The new gaffe that will reshape the race will be, not surprisingly, one of Biden’s.

While he has been proving of late that he is the goofy public speaker who Washington came to know and dread over the decades, most of his errors have been on the 57-state or Sunni/Shia variety.

Not knowing who was president in 1929, or not knowing that the dignitary you asked to stand up and take a bow was in a wheelchair, or bashing your own campaign commercial – all that is just part of what has been the madcap month Biden has been having.

But those things don’t do anything to counter the storyline Biden has presented – a blue-collar guy who fights for working families.

But Biden getting caught on tape last week denouncing the use of coal to an eco-warrior on a rope line will be a blunder that will put a wrinkle in Biden’s  blue collar. “No coal plants here in America,” Biden said of his ticket’s energy plan.

It’s probably just something Biden said to dodge a question, since he surely knows that we get half of our electricity from coal and couldn’t meet the needs of the next two decades without burning even more.

But swing states Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado all have substantial coal mining industries and residents who identify themselves as part of a coal culture.

 

Miners get respect in those places, and organized labor across the country venerates their hard, dangerous work.

It’s the kind of line that makes Biden sound like a phony, putting on for the hicks when he needs to, but thinking like a big-city liberal when he gets back to Washington.

Chris Stirewalt is the political editor of The Washington Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].