Maybe Angle’s gaffes weren’t gaffes after all

Polls from Nevada show Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid at great risk of losing Tuesday to the extreme, right-wing Sharron Angle, whom traditional pundits tend to call "gaffe-prone."

At similar risk, it seems, is the prevailing pundit definition of "gaffe."

Being seriously right-wing and revealing it candidly or even brutally in a politically incorrect pronouncement -- that may not be the gaffe it used to be, at least in the momentary climate.

Barry Goldwater may have been five decades ahead of his time when he said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Or gaffe, apparently.

It was an uncommonly erudite and insightful pundit, Michael Kinsley, who once said that a gaffe is what Washington calls it when a politician lets the truth slip out.

That is all Angle has done. She has occasionally revealed the truth about what she thinks.

Reid, on the other hand, may present the better example of what could be the surviving definition of political gaffe, meaning an ill-advised public statement that embarrasses and discredits the one making the statement.

Here's what I mean:

Reid told book authors that Barack Obama made a good presidential candidate because he didn't possess a Negro dialect unless he needed one. He thus committed a gaffe by stereotyping people racially, thereby embarrassing and discrediting himself and risking dire political consequence, although, it is widely believed, there is nothing in his public policy record to suggest he actually bears any prejudice or animosity toward African-American people.

Then he iced that cake by saying he couldn't imagine why an Hispanic person would ever vote Republican.

These were not uncommon thoughts, but ones best kept inside one's head.

Conversely, when Angle said that a girl impregnated by incestuous rape by her father ought to take that "lemon" and "make lemonade," by carrying the child to term and perhaps offering it for adoption rather than having an abortion, she was saying something indelicate, indeed brutal and arguably crude and offensive, but not necessarily embarrassing or discrediting in political terms.

Cultural conservatives who are uncommonly motivated this political season agree precisely with the essence of what she said, which is that abortion under any circumstance is the taking of a life and a sin, and that there always are options.

Extremism in defense of the life of the unborn is no vice ... and no gaffe, they might say.

When Angle scoffed at Reid's intervening to save jobs in Las Vegas and said it was not a senator's job to save or create jobs, she may not have committed any gaffe. She merely may have expressed a prevailing and popular current attitude among people who resent the spending of hundreds of borrowed billions by the government for an economic stimulus.

These people believe that the best thing government can do for jobs is cut spending, cut taxes, cut regulations and get out of the way of the free and independent business person.

I rather suspect that Tuesday's perhaps-decisive angry voter sees Washington as being in need of more gaffes and fewer truth-dicing finesses. I rather suspect that this perhaps-decisive voter longs for more of the indelicate candor and less of the savvy mumbo-jumbo.

I am wondering, then, if Angle should not have made herself more available to the reporters she spent most of her time eluding for fear of letting slip one more brutal truth about what she actually thinks.

I am wondering if this Nevada race is close only because Angle has committed too few gaffes and hammered insufficiently the ones she has committed.

I am wondering if the real gaffe of the moment might not be this statement: "I'm running for re-election."

John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@ arkansasnews.com.