I was thinking about which political speeches did their own cause the most harm. Not interview gaffes where people were caught off-guard, but carefully prepared speeches that blew up in their face.
It’s tempting to pick Romney’s 47% speech and Clint Eastwood’s “empty chair” from this year… but I think the all time winner is Pat Buchanan’s speech from the 1992 Republican convention. I was basically a kid who knew little about politics at the time, but even I was stunned at what he was saying - he was basically cheering for a return to medieval religious sectarianism, and helped torpedo a very winnable election for the Republicans. (Even though Clinton was great, beating Bush in 1992 was like the Miracle on Ice.)
Well, the Clint Eastwood speech wasn’t a “carefully prepared speech” - according to an interview, the “idea for the now-infamous empty chair came to the actor only 20 minutes before he was scheduled to speak.”
If we’re including ad-lib lines in a speech, I think the winner is George Allen’s Macaca comment.
Not a speech, but not an interview gaffe either was the quote by Mitch McConnell: “the single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
I believe they’re currently claiming that his back injury meant that he was doped up on pain killers and suffering from severe insomnia. Clearly an ideal time to make a presidential run.:rolleyes:
What did Gary Hart say? I thought he was just caught out having an affair.
The Republicans, but I don’t get it, what’s the connection to the 1992 speech?
Yeah, there was no election going on then but this one may be the funniest. I liked his anecdotes that obviously never happened ("…and then some bureaucrat told us that we couldn’t go out and save people") He also used “something called volcano monitoring” as an example of fiscal waste, and then an actual volcano erupted a week later.
When the rumors of an affair surfaced, Hart denied them and said “Follow me around. I don’t care. I’m serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They’ll be very bored.” They followed him around and found Donna Rice.
Howard Dean euthanized his hopes when he enthusiastically lost the primary in Iowa, don’t know how prepared it was, but I’m sure it sounded better in his head.
The part in Sarah Palin’s stump speeches where she praised rural NC as being “Real America”. Basically a big FU to every American (and North Carolinian) who doesn’t live in Mayberry-wanna-be land. That was the only time in the last 35 years that the GOP lost NC.
Rick Perry’s honest and forthright “Strong” exposition of his values. Just goes to show why the US needs to reduce its democracy and restore federalist principles, the majority are impinging on the rights of true patriots.
Pat Buchanan is a white Irish Catholic pro-death-penalty culture warrior, right? What wing of the GOP has been ascendant since 1994? Over the intermediate term, Buchanan’s type have been influential if not dominant.
A classic example was Samuel Burchard’s speech at an 1884 Republican political rally in New York City the week before the election. Burchard, a minister, got fired up and said, “We are Republicans, and don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion. We are loyal to our flag.” (Burchard was a strong prohibitionist and a proud veteran of the Union Army. But he had never been noted as an anti-Catholic. It’s speculated he added “Romanism” to his speech just for the alliteration.)
Burchard wasn’t the candidate. But the candidate James Blaine was present and didn’t comment on Burchard’s remarks. So it was assumed he tacitly agreed with them (although some have argued that Blaine had been attending several campaign events and may simply have not been paying attention to Burchard’s speech).
The problem was that the reason that Blaine was at a rally in New York was that New York was a major swing state in the 1884 election. And one of New York’s voting blocs were Irish Catholics in New York City and they didn’t take well to hearing how the Republicans were opposed to “Romanism”. That weekend, priests in Catholic churches all over the city repeated Burchard’s remarks during their sermons. And on Election Day, a record number of Irish votes went to the Democrats, who won New York by fewer than 1200 votes.
After the election, Blaine said “I should have carried New York by 10,000 votes if the weather had been clear and Dr. Burchard had been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or China.”