It’s the scramble-back that makes you look insecure, stubborn and not all that bright. Does it really matter that Michele Bachmann got her John Waynes mixed up and said she shared a hometown with John Wayne when in fact it was John Wayne Gacy?
“John Wayne was from Waterloo, Iowa. That’s the kind of spirit that I have, too.”
In fact, it was John Wayne Gacy who lived in Waterloo, whereas John Wayne, the actor, was born about 150 miles away, in the Iowa town of Winterset.
Not a sane person in the world jumped on the gaffe to say, “Oh my God, she’s trying to align herself with the Killer Clown!” But the mainstream-lamestream media pounced on the gaffe with unbridled glee, just as they did when Sarah Palin couldn’t name the periodicals she consumed.
The day after Bachmann’s verbal misstep, she appeared on CNN and said, “People can make mistakes and I wish I could be perfect every time I say something, but I can’t.”
Not a bad way to deflect the minor distraction. But Bachmann didn’t stop there. She opted for the scramble-back defense, in which the candidate and the candidate’s team scramble back, huddle up and scour the Internet for research that kinda-sorta backs up an erroneous claim.
“John Wayne’s parents’ first home was in Waterloo, Iowa, and he was from Iowa,” said Bachmann.
Um, OK.
This is the same sort of scramble-back tactic employed by Sarah Palin after Palin said Paul Revere “warned the British that they weren’t gonna be takin’ away our arms by ringing those bells and making sure he’s riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed.”
Of course, Palin meant Revere warned the American colonists, not the British — and the rest of those ad-libbed comments hardly consist of rock-solid history — but it’s not the blunder of all time. It’s not as if Palin had said Paul Revere “not only warned the British but was a member of the greatest rock and roll band of the Sixties, Paul Revere and the Raiders.”
But instead of correcting the record, Palin scrambled back and came out sounding as if she’d just emerged from an all-night study session with a high school history teacher.
“I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere,” she said. “Here’s what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming. Part of his ride was to warn the British that were there that ‘hey, you’re not gonna succeed.’ ”
Countered James Cross Giblin, author of The Many Rides of Paul Revere, in an interview on ABC News: “She was basically wrong. . . . His mission certainly was not to warn the British. It was to get the message to the revolutionaries in Concord.”
Asked if Palin did not get the basic facts right, Giblin replied, “No she did not.”
Some Palin fans even tried to revise history on Wikipedia. Better to alter the facts than to admit our gal is wrong!
Now that’s a real scramble-back.
A founding youngster?
When ABC’s George Stephanopoulos challenged Michele Bachmann’s claim that the Founding Fathers “worked tirelessly to end slavery” and noted that “Jefferson and Washington were slaveholders and slavery didn’t end until the Civil War,” Bachmann countered that John Quincy Adams “tirelessly worked throughout his life to make sure we did in fact one day eradicate slavery.”
Not a good scramble-back, considering John Quincy Adams wasn’t one of the Founding Fathers and was all of 9 years old when the Revolutionary War began.
When Barack Obama made his infamous “57 states” gaffe in 2008, he owned up and made fun of himself later the very same day, noting, “I understand I said there were 57 states today. It’s a sign that my numeracy is getting a little, um . . . ”
It was better for Obama to just admit the mistake than to scramble back and say, “Look, there ARE 57 states. We have the 50 states, plus we’re in a state of confusion, a state of anguish, a state of concern, a state of uncertainty, a state of economic crisis — but also a state of hope and a state of change, and I state right now I’m gonna bring that hope and change to America!”
