The Great Gaffes-By Should Press on in His Race for The…Um…The…

       In 1960, Richard Nixon lost the presidential race to Jack Kennedy by a whisker.  

       In 1976, Gerald Ford lost the presidency to a peanut farmer from Georgia because he (President Ford, not the peanut farmer) prematurely liberated Poland. 

       In 1988, Michael Dukakis was probably going to lose the presidential election to George Herbert Walker Bush.  But his fate may have been sealed when he couldn’t say what he would do if his wife was brutally murdered.   

       Four years later, President Bush glanced impatiently at his watch while Bill Clinton felt our pain.  That same year, Admiral Stockdale plaintively asked, “Who am I, and what am I doing here?”  

       And in 2000, Al Gore repeatedly sighed and then came within inches of physically accosting George Dubya Bush.  

       All these events occurred in either presidential or vice presidential debates, and each of them played a major role in the determining who became the leader of the free world.  

       Long before Watergate, Richard Nixon was the victim of Whiskergate.  Nixon, for whatever reason, decided not to shave prior to appearing in the 1960 presidential debate with Jack Kennedy.  On black and white TV, Nixon’s five o’clock shadow looked like a midnight dust storm.  Consequently, he resembled Yasser Arafat while Kennedy looked like George Clooney.   

       In the 1976 presidential debate, President Ford surprised Lech Walesa and the Solidarity freedom fighters in Poland by announcing that Poland was “not under Soviet domination and never will be.”  Many political observers felt that this mistake by President Ford cost him the election.  In fact, he was just thirteen years ahead of his time in announcing the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall.  

       In the 1988 presidential debate, CNN reporter Bernard Shaw posed a tasteless hypothetical question to Michael Dukakis as to how he would respond if his wife, Kitty, was assaulted and murdered.  Dukakis looked stunned by the question, and mumbled that if Kitty was murdered, he would appoint some sort of committee to look into it.  With this answer, he probably lost Kitty’s vote.     

       In the 1992 presidential debate, a visibly impatient George Herbert Walker Bush looked at his Rolex, while Bill Clinton was feeling our pain.  Unfortunately over the next eight years, the American people learned that pain was not the only thing Bill Clinton liked to feel.    

       And in the 2000 presidential debate, a normally robotic, wooden Al Gore sighed about 50 times, left his podium and stalked then-Governor George Dubya Bush like a professional wrestler.   

       The 2012 presidential election is a year away.  Nevertheless, there have already been 47 Republican candidate debates, presenting numerous opportunities for candidates for our nation’s highest office to prove they’re not destined to have their faces carved on the side of Mt. Rushmore.  

       The latest presidential debate gaffe occurred in a Republican debate on Wednesday night when Texas Governor Rick Perry had his now-famous quote “oops” moment.  He temporarily forgot the name of one of three federal agencies he promises to abolish if he becomes our President.  (Maybe it was the Department of Memorization.)   

       The “lame stream media” (as Governor Sarah Palin thoughtfully describes it) jumped on the “oops” moment as if it proved that Governor Perry is the Great Gaffes-by, and therefore totally unfit for the presidency.  

       Well, my fellow Americans, I think this is nonsense on stilts.  I don’t know if Rick Perry is qualified to be president, but I don’t think he should be disqualified simply because he forgot that he wants to abolish the Department of …um the department of…uh…well, whatever it is.  

       Besides, if he is elected President, he’ll have advisors whose job it is to remember what government agencies he promised to abolish and remind him to do it.  Hey, it worked for President Reagan, didn’t it?  Whenever he forgot something, Nancy and her astrologer were there to remind him what he promised to do and made sure he did it.   

       I say Governor Perry should return for the next 75 or 80 Republican candidate debates.  And who knows?  With a little luck, he may end up being the last person standing at the end of the Republican Presidential Candidate Demolition Derby.  In that case, next October, he will be in the Super Bowl of presidential debates against Barack Obama.    

       If that happens, Governor Perry should try to remember to shave.