In the September 30, 2004 debate between George W. Bush and John Kerry, the word “mistake” arose 13 times in the context of Iraq, offering Bush ample opportunity to admit that he had made at least one mistake. Kerry admitted to having made significant mistakes while George Bush admitted to none.
BUSH: My opponent says help is on the way, but . . . it’s certainly hard to tell it when he voted against the $87-billion supplemental to provide equipment for our troops, and then said he actually did vote for it before he voted against it.
Not what a commander in chief does when you’re trying to lead troops.
LEHRER: Senator Kerry, 30 seconds.
KERRY: Well, you know, when I talked about the $87 billion, I made a mistake in how I talk about the war. But the president made a mistake in invading Iraq. Which is worse?
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004a.
html
Apparently, much of the public believed Kerry’s mistake was worse – admitting a mistake, changing his story, and becoming a “flip-flopper” – because Bush went on to win the election.
The New York Times said,
Until sometime early in the summer, President Bush and his advisers sporadically wrestled with a fundamental choice: Was it smarter to go into the final months of the election campaign confessing to considerable error in decisions leading up to the invasion of Iraq, and in early calculations about how best to occupy the country? Or would the president – “not a man given to backward-looking introspection,” as one close aide put it – be better off conceding only the smallest errors of judgment, and focusing the electorate on the hope of a bright future for Iraq and the whole Middle East?
Mr. Bush chose the second option. To choose otherwise, one of Mr. Bush’s advisers said the other day, would be “to give John Kerry the opening he was waiting for.”
But now, in the final 23 days of the campaign, that decision has come to look far riskier than it did in the flush of handing Iraq back to Iraqis. Win or lose, when the history of the 2004 Bush campaign is written, it may turn out that the bet about how to talk about the war will prove pivotal. Mr. Bush held his bet through the presidential debate Friday, declining a questioner’s invitation to describe any mistake he had made. http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/weekin
review/10sang.html?ex=1172725200&en=
ac83b971d8fdeb28&ei=5070
But, at the time the talking heads and many Democrats ridiculed Bush for his unwillingness to admit having made mistakes. From CNN:
BORGER: . . . [O]ne of the most interesting things to me, Howie, was sort of the question that the president was asked about, can you ever remember a mistake you made? And this time, unlike the last time he was asked that…
KURTZ: When he was at a press conference.
BORGER: When he was at a press conference, he was a little bit more prepared. And he said, well, if what you mean is did I make a mistake in going into Iraq, the answer is no. Yes, I made a couple of mistakes on presidential appointments, but I’m not going to talk about those now.
And what you see is the Kerry campaign saying, this is a stubborn person who will never admit that he has made a mistake. And that is something they are talking about. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0
410/10/rs.01.html
Still, Bush’s strategy won the day: “Better to be perceived as wrong and resolute than to be perceived as an irresolute flip-flopper in a time of war.”
And still John Edwards continues today on his National Apology Tour, with the anti-war Left encouraging him and demanding that other candidates join the John Edwards Lollapalooza Apology Jamboree. He said recently, “”There’s not a single voter in America who doesn’t understand that their president is human, and their president will sometimes makes mistakes.” Yahoo.News
Other candidates refuse to join Edwards either because the have nothing to apologize for or because they don’t believe the Apology Tour is the best way to win the Presidency and end the war. After the Kerry/Bush rout, can you blame them? Are we Democrats trying to win an election or win a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for most apologies on a single issue?
Are we apologizing repeatedly out of genuine contrition or merely in the vain hopes of gaining a strategic advantage over other candidates?
One of the most famous American apologies was Jimmy Carter’s 1976 admission that, as concerned adultery, he had “sinned in his heart”.
PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: In an interview published in the November 1976 issue of Playboy magazine, then-Governor Carter talked about the role of religion in his life. In one part he said:
“I try not to commit a deliberate sin. I recognize that I’m going to do it anyhow, because I’m human and I’m tempted. And Christ set some almost impossible standards for us. Christ said, ‘I tell you that anyone who looks on a woman with lust has in his heart already committed adultery.’
“I’ve looked on a lot of women with lust. I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times. This is something that God recognizes I will do–and I have done it–and God forgives me for it.”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/character/gl
ossaries/carter.html
As obvious as the admission seemed, since most of us have sinned in our hearts and do so daily in one way or another, still Jimmy Carter’s admission became a scandal and the focus of national derision until his presidency ended abruptly after one term, with the election of the less apologetic Ronald Reagan. It’s not that Democrats can’t win the Presidency, but just that apologizing isn’t historically an effective way of doing so. Bill Clinton won the presidency twice by running hard on the issues that effect the people who work hard everyday to make ends meet, “growing the economy” and making the world a safer and better place.
Candidates and supporters who believe we can win the presidency on a wave of apologies should learn the lessons of history. As valid as apologies may be factually, the election usually goes to the candidate who apologizes the least.
Cross posted at the Francis L. Holland Blog.
francislholland@yahoo.com
talked about looking at women lustfully in an interview with Playboy. How great is that?
Francis L. Holland really does read it for the articles đŸ˜‰
Obviously, I think it depends on: a) the apologizer, and b.) what the apology is for. Harry Truman was famous for “the buck stops here,” and a defining moment of the Kennedy administration was when he took full responsibility for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. George Bush, meanwhile, has dismal poll numbers heading into the twilight of his presidency, in part due the public’s growing awareness since the election that he has no idea what he’s doing, and thus won’t apologize for his mistakes.
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Is Edwards trailing? Certainly. But it’s EARLY, and he trails due in large part to the perceived might of the Clinton campaign. I don’t think you can’t chalk that lead in the polls due solely to whether or not one apologizes.
Sometimes an apology is necessary and will tremendously help a politician, as long as the mistakes aren’t ticking off the chart. However, it has to be authentic.
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I also agree on Edwards… there are myriad reasons why he’s trailing, least of which is the fact that he apologizes too often. Quite honestly, I can’t stand the guy – he seems so fake and will say anything to anyone. He’s not going to win, but it has little to do with potential apologies. He wasn’t even going to win reelection as a Senator, which is precisely why he ran for VP last time around so willingly.
the opposite. Much was made of Kerry’s botched joke, and how a quicker apology would have brought quicker redemption.
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I don’t buy it. Pundits may howl for an apology, but that doesn’t mean they really care about getting one. Far from it. The smell of blood just gets them more excited.
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By contrast, they seem to love “taking responsibility.” Look how Reagan “took responsibility” for Iran Contra and Beirut. He went on TV and said, “I take responsibility.” That’s all. And the press fawned.
I admit I didn’t read this post all the way through. I got as far as the second example, and since both of them seemed so entirely wrong, I gave up there.
Wrong. It is far far too early for “who would you vote for” poll results to mean anything. Any inference you take from these numbers falls into the category of “wild-assed guess”.
Here we go beyond wild-assed guesses. This is an assertion that is almost certainly wrong and misleading. Bush did not win the election because the electorate answered Kerry’s question in the opposite way Kerry wanted. To the extent that that little snippet of debate related to the larger reasons why he lost, it’s in that he made a weak and ineffective response. People never “punished” Kerry because they knew he made a “mistake” in how he phrased that comment; however, that comment fed into the Bush campaign’s message that Kerry was a “flip-flopper” who could not communicate clearly because his values and policies weren’t clear. Kerry unintentionally supported Bush’s message by, in fact, not communicating clearly. This has nothing to do with anyone’s reaction to Kerry’s “mistake” or his “apology” for it.
Based on the first two examples, I’m not gonna bother to read the rest.
I think that is a pretty good diagnosis of what happened to Kerry. Bush painted him as trying to have everything both ways, and then Kerry seemed to prove him right.
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Like Dole falling of the stage reinforced the notion–already extant– that he might be a bit on the elderly side.
defending her no-apologies position. There’s your context.
also, anyone who cannot learn from mistakes and admit them candidly is NOT someone I want in authority.
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DSS is a prime example of “never admit you were wrong” and “always find someone else to blame”.
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My .02
..asking “Do you apologize for xx?”, I just want to reach out and slap them.
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I’m no fan of Hillary Clinton, but I found it truly refreshing to hear her say “hey, if it’s apologies you want, there are others that you can vote for”.
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I hope that more folks will start telling these apology mongers to shut-the-bleep-up.
Correlation does not imply causation.
You’re right; from Bonzo to Ollie North to Dubya, Americans have preferred wrongheaded and unapologetic when presented with a choice. (As an aside, I wonder if this isn’t partly responsible for the gender gap in voting preference — to many women, the culprits must seem like the guy who would rather be lost than ask for directions!)
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Up front, I’ll say I was pretty disappointed in the Democrats’ war votes, since it was clear to me and a lot of other people that the war justification was complete bull from day one. It’s at the moment of truth, and not later, with the benefit of hindsight, that the country needs its elected representatives to make courageous stands.
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However, if this is about apologizing for an Iraq vote, there is a line of reasoning that says Bush and Congressional Republicans effectively bullied the rest of Congress into voting for the war on the basis of evidence we now know (and some of us then knew) was cooked, but which they had no choice (from a political standpoint) but to believe; and to now bully those individuals into admitting the vote was a mistake is massively unfair, in light of the fact that Bush has — even after all this time — not been held responsible in any way by the press or the American public. He hasn’t even been asked to apologize, much less face the possibility of stronger sanctions for what would most certainly be — in sane times — an impeachable offense. When I think of it in those terms, the whole discussion of apologizing for voting for the war — as if it was Edwards, Clinton, and Kerry who lied to the American public — is ludicrous.
…I do not consider Edward’s statement an apology. I consider it an admission of error. It would be nice if more politicians would be willing to admit error–admitting error shows a sign of growth.
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Not even politicians are all-knowing and all-seeing all the time, although some of their public relations people would like to make others believe they are.
To me, the ultimate political apology was Nixon’s ‘Checkers’ speech. He screwed up, admitted he screwed up, and then revealed a smidge of humanity by saying that while he would return chancy donations, he was NOT going to return the gift of a dog from a lobbyist ‘because my little girls LOVE that dog’.
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How many times did Bill Weld charm the public with a Sorry and a Shoeshine? When Deval called his press conference to grudgingly offer his faux apology – ‘I’m just sorry you are all so STOOPID as to be INTERESTED in such things, as I am on SUCH a higher plane (or helicopter)’ – I kept envisioning Big Red in the same circumstances – ‘Ya got me good. It was a dumb stunt that I didn’t think through, and I’m happy to pick up the tab. So, boys, what’s next?’. Could have been ten minutes instead of ten days.
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That is the crux of political apologies. KISS, and TRY to sound like you mean it, at least a little. Kerry never offered any apologies, just justifictions on the Iraq vote and the ‘botched joke’ as to why were weren’t smart enough to understand him. Screw ‘ If I have offeneded anybody…’ You DID! You may not have meant it, but they WERE offended! Don’t try to analyze if they WERE offended, or were ENTITLED to be offended, just admit – I am SORRY! I OFFENDED you! I did NOT mean to!
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WHY is that so hard for some of these clowns?
was not the target of utterly mendacious right-wing smear machine attacks.
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At least, not until he tried to become ambassador to Mexico.
…Weld became a target of the mendacious right-wing smear machine after he–for no explicable reason–wanted to become ambassador to Mexico (Paul Celluci was more intelligent–he actually selected to become ambassador to a civilized country) after having dissed your Republican senator and right-wing jackass Jesse Helms. It was Helms who blocked Weld’s nomination, because of that slight.
Kerry never offered any apologies, just justifictions on the Iraq vote…
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I’ll take that as a Freudian slip.
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and the ‘botched joke’ as to why were weren’t smart enough to understand him. Screw ‘ If I have offeneded anybody…’ You DID!
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Apparently, you are either too dumb or too partisan–or both–to realize that, in context the joke was correct, and that, taken out of context as the right wing Republican smear machine did, was what resulted in any offense.
Context was irrelevant. Content was offensive, even if inadvertant. Apologize regardless.
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Didn’t your mommy teach you ANYTHING?
I have no problem with the fact that John Edwards has apologized for his war vote. What I have a huge problem with is the fact that he has become a serial apologizer, to the extent that he looks unpresidential. Moreover, he uses the fact that he apologized as a tool against Hillary but he doesn’t have the balls to actually use her name; and when asked after his speeches IF he meant Hillary, he replies that he will leave it to Hillary to let her conscience be her guide. What a sickening dude he really is. He poses no threat to Hillary Clinton and his ill-conceived plan to use his apology against her has failed.
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He’s stuck in third place and I predict he’ll drop out sooner than later, and good riddance to him.
…John Edwards issued an acknowledgement of error in his vote. An acknowledgement of error is not an apology. An apology is issued when one makes a formal acknowledgement of moral failure. An acknowldgement of error is an acknowledgement that one made a mistake. The mistake need not have been of one of a moral failing. It is a subtle difference, but a very real one.
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I really do wish that people would understand the difference.