Michele Bachmann seems to have erred today when she said in her announcement speech she drew inspiration from actor John Wayne from her hometown Waterloo, Iowa. Apparently, he’s from Winterset, and there’s a museum honoring the screen legend in that otherwise little known burg. The John Wayne from Waterloo is serial killer John Wayne Gacy. Oops.
This mistake will, no doubt, provide some good material for comedians. It will certainly linger in the public’s memory of her. But is it the sort of gaffe that will really hurt her campaign?
Maybe, but I doubt it. Clunkers that help kill candidacies and blight careers are generally mistakes ordinary persons think are errors they would not make. The most famous and most damaging political gaffe may have been Gerald Ford’s astonishing statement during the 1976 presidential debate with Jimmy Carter in which he “liberated” Poland from Soviet rule. That was bad not only because it was a stupid thing to say, but because most Americans knew that Poland was a Soviet satellite and thus understood Ford had something dumb without having smarty-pants journalists tell them that it was. Similarly, Dan Quayle never lived down his misspelling of “potato,” because most of us knew the correct spelling or at least pretended we did.
On a less earth-shaking level, Michele Bachmann’s statement earlier this year in which she placed the Revolutionary War battle of Concord in Concord, New Hampshire, rather than its correct location in Massachusetts was a genuine gaffe. Americans with even a dim memory of their school lessons know about Lexington and Concord.
But however embarrassing Bachmann’s invocation of the Wayne from the wrong town in Iowa may be, this is not the same kind of mistake. Most Americans, even many of those who still love the Duke’s movies, probably couldn’t have told you which state he was born in, let alone which Iowa hamlet has the proper claim to his legacy. So are we all really going to look down our noses at her because she made a mistake about a topic most of us did not know ourselves? Actually, a better question might be why a candidate would claim to be inspired by a guy who just played American heroes rather than any actual heroes. (Wayne was an icon of the cinema and made some true classics, but he stayed in Hollywood during World War II making movies rather than seeing action in the armed services like actor Jimmy Stewart and other Hollywood stars did.)
While it is arguable someone from Waterloo ought to know where Wayne was born, I find it hard to believe even the most hard-core Hawkeye patriots will not vote for Bachmann because she did not know. However, this gaffe does represent some poor staff work by the Bachmann campaign. Bachmann has just learned the hard way campaign speeches need to be fact-checked.
