In the age of the Internet, where even the smallest insult is magnified a hundredfold on Facebook and the like, the candidates deserve a certain amount of leniency or exemption.
There should be a statute of limitations for faux pas, a pardon process for politicians who say something stupid.
As Democrats try to portray Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance as “weird,” we hear a lot about childless “cat ladies” and some remarks he made about Donald Trump as if he were “America’s Hitler,” long before he knew how easily Trump can destroy a Republican’s career.
And over the next three months, Democrats will remind us of Trump’s greatest accomplishments – like calling illegal immigrants rapists and drug smugglers, the Access Hollywood video “Grab ’em” and his thoughts about being a dictator for a day.
The Republican National Committee certainly has videos of many embarrassing remarks from Vice President Kamala Harris, and when her media honeymoon ends in a week or two, she will get the full opposition research treatment. Governor Ron DeSantis is already calling her a “San Francisco liberal,” and the Trump campaign wants to portray her as Joe Biden in a pantsuit.
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When candidates or incumbents use hateful statements to gain political advantage—like George Wallace, who promised “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” when he took office as governor of Alabama—they should remember that. It’s not just a slip of the tongue.
Candidates who invoke racism, anti-Semitism, greed or warmongering should live by the words on which their careers were based.
But with time, experience, and perhaps an apology, the insult should be lessened. What is said often depends on how it is heard.
Trump, for example, recently told a Christian audience: “If you vote for him, you don’t have to do that anymore. Four more years, you know what, then everything will be sorted out, then everything will be fine, then you won’t have to vote anymore…”
This is coming from a man who started an insurrection on January 6, 2021, to stay in power. It sounds like he’s going to cancel future elections and just stay in power like Joseph Stalin. But if you like him, Trump just said he’s going to win the culture wars so Christians can stay home on future election days.
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Vance wasn’t yet a senator from Ohio and certainly had no visions of the vice presidency when he lamented in 2021 that the country was “run by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are unhappy with their own lives and the choices they’ve made and therefore want to make the rest of the country unhappy too.” This kind of man-talk is fine to silly on Tucker Carlson’s show, but it doesn’t help with the suburban women Trump so desperately needs this year.
The worst thing about political faux pas is that they often remind us what we don’t like about a candidate.
In a debate with Jimmy Carter in 1976, President Gerald Ford said there was no Soviet dominance over Poland and Eastern Europe. This meant that the Poles did not accept Kremlin dominance, but it increased doubts about Ford’s intelligence.
In a Playboy interview, Carter said he had “lust in his heart” for women. Who doesn’t? But that’s a weird way of putting it.
In another interview, Carter used the term “ethnic purity” to describe black, Hispanic, Jewish, or Asian neighborhoods in major cities. To the highly sensitive, the term sounded a bit like “master race,” but no one looking at Carter’s past would consider him a fanatic.
Sometimes someone else’s faux pas rubs off on a passerby. In 1884, a New York boss introducing Republican candidate James G. Blaine called the Democrats the party of “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” Anti-Catholicism was fairly common at the time, but the insult killed Blaine with the city’s Italian, Irish, Hispanic, and Polish voting blocs.
Sometimes politics is embarrassing. Trump denies knowing anything about Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s plan to turn America into the dreams of a beer-drinking frat boy who just discovered Ayn Rand. Meanwhile, Democrats want to pretend Harris was never the “border czar.”
Like the enforcer on a hockey team, some candidates make slip-ups part of their show. The late Senator Bob Dole was known as a thug, and Vice President Spiro Agnew played the assassin for Richard Nixon, who had made his name as a thug under Dwight Eisenhower twenty years earlier.
In the age of the Internet, where even a small insult is magnified a hundredfold on Facebook and the like, candidates deserve leniency or a certain amount of relief. Anyone who gives six or eight speeches and interviews a day is bound to screw one up now and then.
Unless you’ve never changed your mind about something and never said something that didn’t come across the way you meant it, you should give these guys a chance.
Bill Cotterell is a retired capital city reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at [email protected]
