Don't skewer Jeb Bush over half of a sentence

His "longer hours" remark was just a dumb gaffe. Get him over everything else.

Jeb Bush
(Image credit: Illustrated Brock Miller/Splash News/Corbis)

The 2016 gaffe wars have finally begun. Oh, there have been gaffes before now in this presidential race, but the one Jeb Bush uttered on Wednesday — that in order to get our economy moving, "people need to work longer hours" — may be the first of this campaign's gaffes that is being accepted by both his political opponents and the media as terribly consequential ("Jeb Bush's 'Longer Hours' Remark Will Haunt Him," reads a headline at Time magazine). I may not have a lot of love for Jeb, but even this liberal is willing to say that on this one, he's getting a bum rap.

As I've mentioned before, my gaffe rule is this: When determining how harshly we ought to judge a candidate for something everyone is calling a gaffe, we have to ask whether 1) he made the statement once, extemporaneously, or said it multiple times; and 2) whether, given the chance, he'd put it differently. If it's something that just came out wrong one time, the candidate ought to be forgiven.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.