Michael Kinsley once famously defined a gaffe as when a politician says what he or she truly believes (i.e., “a gaffe occurs not when a politician lies, but when he tells the truth”), a formulation so iconic that it is now known in the trade as a “Kinsley Gaffe.” A special subcategory of Kinsley Gaffe is becoming more common in these days of ubiquitous personal electronics: “accidentally telling the truth without knowing a camera or a tape recorder was running.” This is the category where we’d put Obama’s remarks about “bitter” working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them” and Mitt Romney’s complaint about “the 47 percent.”
Megan McArdle, “Simple Policies Win Elections”, Bloomberg View, 2014-11-11.
November 19, 2015
QotD: The Kinsley Gaffe
Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: BarackObama, ElectionWatch, MittRomney — Nicholas @ 01:00
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