Blumenthal not the first politician to 'misspeak'

It’s truly amazing how frequently the verb “misspoke†is used by the nation’s political class as a handy substitute for the word most other people use — lied.

After a week in which two prominent Connecticut politicians claimed to have misspoken — Senate candidate Dick Blumenthal when he lied about serving in Vietnam and Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez by lying when he told an investigator he had paid a city contractor to remodel his kitchen and bathroom — I googled political misspeaking right back to its not too surprising roots, the presidency of Richard M. Nixon.

“The Nixon administration has developed a new language — a kind of Nix-speak,†Time Magazine reported on April 30, 1973. “Government officials are entitled to make flat statements one day, and the next day reverse field with the simple phrase, ‘I misspoke myself.â€

Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler later discarded the awkward “I misspoke myself†by declaring administration lies simply “inoperative†but inoperative was eventually ridiculed out of existence, and by the 1980s, politicians were again insisting they didn’t lie, they misspoke.

It continues to this day, or at least, to last week, with Blumenthal and Perez. The Connecticut mayor and attorney general are Democrats, but for every Democrat, you can find a Republican who has misspoken, misspeaking being one of the few remaining bipartisan art forms.

Before Mayor Perez, we had the Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who said he misspoke after he enraged New York cops and firemen by boasting, “I went to Ground Zero as often, if not more than the workers. I was there working with them. I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to.†The cops and firefighters said he showed up only for photo-ops but there were lots of those.

Those remarks were made in the 2008 presidential campaign, a sort of golden age for misspeaking.

There was Hillary Clinton’s exciting recollection of a visit to Bosnia, “landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of ceremony at the airport,†Hillary recalled, “but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.†When news accounts showed Clinton accepting flowers and listening to a child read a poem at the airport, spokesman Howard Wolfson acknowledged the candidate “may have misspoke.â€

Clinton’s opponent, Barak Obama, used a real or imagined “wise old woman†to explain himself when he was caught on tape telling a group of Democratic fat cats in San Francisco of his disdain for rural folk “who cling to their guns and their religion and their antipathy to people who aren’t like them.â€

“My syntax was poor,†said the candidate blessed with syntax that rarely rated as poor, “but a wise old woman who was talking to me the other day, said, ‘You misspoke but you didn’t lie.â€â€™ If you think about it, the wise old woman was right. Obama was telling the San Francisco liberals what he really thought of the rural yokels; he just didn’t want them to hear about it.

Tape also undid John McCain during the campaign when he sauntered through an Iraqi market place to proclaim how the Bush administration had made Iraq secure for its people. When the tape later revealed the contingent of heavily armed bodyguards surrounding him, McCain admitted to a misspeak.

What would happen to a politician who actually admitted he lied? History provides few answers because so few have done it, but I found one who left no doubt.

After he was elected prime minister of Hungary in 2006 by claiming the nation’s economy was just fine when it wasn’t, Ferenc Gyurcsány went on the radio and told the citizenry how he got elected:

“We lied in the morning, we lied in the evening and also at night.â€

Gyurcsány remained prime minister until he retired in 2009, when he decided his staying on would hinder further economic reforms.

Dick Ahles is a retired journalist from Simsbury. E-mail him at dahles@hotmail.com.