Obama: Will his ‘private sector’ gaffe cost him the election?

last updated 8 January 2015

It was only six words, said Alex Koppelman in NewYorker.com, but President Obama is paying a steep price for his gaffe last week that “the private sector is doing fine.” Within hours, the campaign of presidential rival Mitt Romney went into full attack mode, generating ads mocking Obama’s indifference to Americans’ economic misery, while Romney himself called it “an extraordinary misunderstanding by a president that’s out of touch.” Obama just made presidential history, said John Podhoretz in the New York Post, joining a long list of candidates who’ve self-destructed with disastrous statements. In 2008, John McCain destroyed voters’ confidence by saying, in the midst of the Wall Street meltdown, that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Four years earlier, John Kerry confirmed he was a flip-flopper when he said he’d voted to fund the Iraq troop surge “before I voted against it.” With 8.2 percent unemployment, stagnant wage growth, and widespread economic anxiety, Obama’s breezy moment of complacency last week “may prove to be the pivotal moment for the 2012 campaign.”

He might have used more sensitive phrasing, said Kevin Drum in MotherJones.com, but Obama was “more right than wrong.” The private sector of our economy is currently adding about 2 million jobs a year—not great, but okay, given the historic depth of the recent recession. State and local governments, on the other hand, are shedding an average of 200,000 jobs a year. These workers are real people, and their unemployment creates “significant drag on an already fragile economy.” In mocking Obama, Romney committed an even bigger gaffe of his own, said Michael Tomasky in TheDailyBeast.com. Incredulously, he said the president actually wants to see governments hire “more firemen, more policemen, more teachers” as a boost to the economy. Imagine that! Romney’s contempt for hardworking public servants—people who keep us safe and educate our children—will not be forgotten by middle-class swing voters.

Voters know that this election is about one thing—the economy, said Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post. That’s why Obama’s self-inflicted wound is so devastating. By saying the private sector is “fine,” he only proved what voters already suspect: He’s “out of his depth” on the economy and “hostile to private business.” The last thing most Americans want is to see politicians like Obama spending more taxpayer money hiring more government workers, creating more bureaucracy and more national debt. Indeed, Obama now looks utterly “out of touch,” as Romney will remind voters a few thousand times between here and November. “When a guy building a California vacation mansion with a car elevator for his wife’s two Cadillacs calls you ‘out of touch’—and no one laughs—you know you are in trouble.”

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I hate to spoil the fun, but “gaffes don’t matter,” said Ezra Klein in WashingtonPost.com. In the heat of campaigns, every candidate makes them, creating an impressive blooper-reel of brain freezes and verbal slip-ups. Remember Romney’s “I like to fire people” and “I’m not concerned about the very poor”? Partisans gleefully seize on gaffes to justify their already dim view of opposition candidates, but one dumb statement changes few minds, and barely even registers with uncommitted voters—who generally don’t start following the campaigns closely until September. In an election where the two candidates are offering such dramatically different governing philosophies, “you have to have an extraordinarily low opinion of voters” to believe that “verbal miscues are going to be the deciding factor.”