Candidates Must Steer Clear of Political Potholes
Jules Witcover

There is one point in the current presidential campaign about which both President Obama and Republican challenger Mitt Romney agree: that the central issue is the role of the federal government. Should its powers be used aggressively to cope with the current economic stall, or should it get out of the way and let the competitive forces of the free enterprise system work their will?

The president argues that further stimulus is required but is blocked by Republican obstructionism in Congress. Romney insists that government under Obama, by imposing excessive federal regulation, is impeding the ability of free enterprise to right the economy.

These are legitimate differences worthy of debate in a presidential campaign that public opinion polls suggest will come down to a very close election in November. Unfortunately, as has happened often in the past, less significant matters have surfaced or have been manufactured by one side or the other that trivialize the discourse.

Should Romney disavow Donald Trump for raising questions about Obama's birthplace and hence his right to be president? Should Romney's practice of the Mormon faith and his tin ear for public concerns be barriers to his election? And so on.

Beyond such distractions, in any close election there is always the danger that something said by one candidate or another, either a true mistake or a careless or inadvertent "gaffe," can have an inordinate influence on voters' judgment. In the current campaign, there already have been several of them.

Romney's penchant for making comments that seem to convey insensitivity to how his great wealth separates him from the average voter has repeatedly betrayed him. They range from his wife's two Cadillacs and the car elevator for a new vacation home to his friendship with NASCAR team owners rather than with the grunts in the viewing stands.

As for Obama, he found himself in hot water recently for erroneously referring to a Nazi concentration camp in Poland during World War II as "a Polish death camp," to the ire of Polish government officials. Obama obviously knew the difference, but he failed to catch the gaffe at once. It injected a momentary glitch into his campaign, for which he later apologized.

Ironically, a gaffe by an earlier presidential nominee, President Gerald R. Ford, seeking election in his own right in 1976, undermined his own campaign in a later debate with Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. When he blurted out that Poland at the time was not under Soviet domination, he was given an opportunity to correct himself, but he dug in and repeated the obviously false impression.

The gaffe in itself, while it may not have bothered most voters very much, arrested his 11th-hour momentum in closing the gap with Carter, as aides tried to convince him of his mistake and to acknowledge it publicly. By the time he did, it was too late to turn the election around.

Such intrusions into serious and substantive discussion of what a presidential campaign should be about can become a fatal pothole in any candidate's carefully charted course in a closely contested campaign like the current one.

To their credit, both Obama and Romney have strived to cast the November election in terms of the basic question of what the federal government's role should be, especially as the country struggles to recover from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

The Democratic incumbent continues to argue that, in a period of undeniable economic peril, government must intervene with attempts to stimulate growth. In reply, Romney and the Republican congressional leadership balk, reprising Ronald Reagan's old dictum that "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

In any event, voters must choose the nominee who not only has charted the best course to take, but who also has the qualifications and ability to deliver on his promises. The fall campaign, and particularly the debates between Obama and Romney, need to flesh out their differences without regard to extraneous gaffes that may yet surface on either side.

 

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Candidates Must Steer Clear of Political Potholes | Politics

 

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