Christopher Hitchens

[Plane]

If I am right about this, it would go some way to explaining the huge effect that a non-gaffe can sometimes have. You know the sort of thing I mean: Howard Dean’s Bates Motel squawk was nothing in literal terms when set beside Perry’s monumental self-sabotage. But the fact was that people did think they had detected a “contents under pressure” streak in Dean, and this looked like its blazing occurrence at twilight’s last gleaming. In similar or related ways, Al Gore didn’t really claim to have invented the Internet or been the whole inspiration for Love Story; Dan Quayle never expressed surprise that they didn’t speak Latin in Latin America (it would have been a highly ingenious blunder for him to have made); and Gov. Jerry Brown and the word “moonbeam” have no obvious connection of any sort. But somehow there seemed plausibility—for quite other reasons—to the insinuations. And that’s often enough. One day I’ll make a fortune by discovering who is on the committee that decides as between gaffes and terminal screw-ups, and then by discovering how one gets to join said committee. Someone must know.

Ross Douthat has almost claimed to be one of those people. In a  column in the New York Times last month, he posited an actuarial reason to keep the Republican field of candidates as full, and as open, as humanly possible: Romney has already won. So no need to disqualify any of the lesser candidates with terminal screw-ups. But—and here is where Douthat’s column gets rather clever—Romney isn’t necessarily going to wrap it up soon, and neat, and tight, because my great profession cannot yet bear to declare him victorious. My profession (or craft or racket) is not alone in this reluctance. We must also consider the pollsters, the farmers, and tenders of focus groups, the producers of candidate debates, the places where they sing and where new and aspirant pundits are constantly being grown, like exotic outgrowths on a moistened sponge in the dark. (You understand that I am here offering only a rough précis of Douthat’s more rigorous presentation.)

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/fighting_words/2011/11/perry_cain_gingrich_bachmann_the_gaffes_of_the_republican_presidential_field_.2.html