ON DEADLINE: Clinton, Obama pay 'gaffe taxes' for blunders

Barack Obama's lament about the political obsession with gaffes instead of policy issues makes a point while missing a bigger one. Arguments about missteps are indeed diversions from the things that really affect voters. But there is and always has been a toll exacted from the candidate who blunders.

Call it the gaffe tax.

It cost President Gerald R. Ford his momentum in the final phase of his losing 1976 campaign. It stalled Jimmy Carter four years later. It is being levied on Obama now, with Hillary Clinton trying to push up the cost while seeking a bye for her own misstatements.

"I think what's important is to make sure that we don't get so obsessed with gaffes that we lose sight of the fact that this is a defining moment in our history," Obama said in the latest, and perhaps last, debate of the Democratic campaign, in Philadelphia Wednesday night.

He and Clinton both said that when candidates are talking as constantly as they are, there are bound to be errors. The question becomes how significant they are - and how damaging.

In Obama's case, the persistent problem is his comment at a closed fundraising event in San Francisco early this month that small-town voters, suffering economically, "get bitter" and cling to things like religion, guns and ethnic differences in their frustration. It was an attempt to explain why he has difficulty attracting support from some blocs of voters.

"I can see how people were offended," Obama said in the debate. "It's not the first time that I've made a statement that was mangled up. It's not going to be the last."

Clinton had her own explaining to do, of her claim, repeated at least twice earlier in the campaign, that her foreign policy experience was dramatized by a trip to Bosnia in 1995 as first lady when she landed under sniper fire at the airport there. It wasn't true. She and daughter Chelsea were welcomed at an airport ceremony that included flowers from a Bosnian girl.

She said she was embarrassed and had apologized for the mistake. "And it is, I hope, something that you can look over," she said.

"We both have said things that, you know, turned out not to be accurate," she said, and got back to berating Obama.

Indeed, every candidate is bound to slip up now and then. It can be a big deal or a glitch depending on where it happens and when. So, for example, when Ford denied in a campaign debate with Carter that the Soviet Union dominated its satellite bloc, it effectively stalled what had seemed to be a late surge in his campaign. "There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration," he said, a flat misstatement he refused to correct until too late.

Carter stumbled in his 1980 campaign debate with Ronald Reagan, saying that before he had asked his daughter, Amy, then 13, what the most important issue was and "she said nuclear weaponry." That led to purposefully overstated taunts that he was getting nuclear advice from a teenager.

That wasn't so, of course, but Carter had to explain and defend what he'd said, which is the other problem for a candidate who missteps. The gaffe takes the candidate off message and he or she has to spend campaign time playing defense, trying to undo the damage.

Sticking to the message is a political art form. Nobody did it better than Reagan in his first winning presidential campaign - and in his first term in the White House. There was a message of the day. His campaign operatives and then his administration got it, rehearsed it and stuck to it. When Reagan was asked a question that might have changed the subject, he pretended not to hear it, sometimes with a hand cupped to his ear.

It isn't that easy now. Not with the Internet and the all-day, all-night political talk on cable television. Obama's ill-advised statement about bitter voters was made in a closed meeting, but it was on the Internet within days. Clinton's sniper-free Bosnia arrival was on tape and on television.

For Obama, there is a related problem in the persistent questioning and commentary about the inflammatory sermons of his former Chicago pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. "I've discussed this extensively," he said in the debate, and then had to discuss it again, saying that he had not heard the sermons in church but that he found them offensive and objectionable when he did see them.

Preachers have made trouble for candidates before, most famously in 1884. Republican James G. Blaine spoke to a meeting of Protestant ministers in New York late in that campaign. He didn't pay attention to the introduction, so he didn't hear the Rev. Samuel D. Burchard denounce Democrats as the party of "rum, Romanism and rebellion." The Democrats did not miss it; they put it into handbills and spread it across New York. Blaine disavowed the comment, but too late to matter. With Roman Catholic voters angered by the slur, he narrowly lost New York and with it the election to Grover Cleveland.

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EDITOR'S NOTE - Walter R. Mears reported on presidential campaigns for The Associated Press from 1960 until 2004, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the 1976 race. He is retired and lives in Chapel Hill, N.C.