By Jonathan Easley and Niall Stanage - 04-23-15 06:00 AM EDT
The 2016 presidential field is off to a bumbling start.
Many of the White House hopefuls are showing they are rookies on the presidential campaign trail. None of the early mistakes, gaffes or lapses in judgment so far are bid-killers, but they do highlight candidates who are adjusting to the brightest spotlight in politics.
Sen. Rand Paul’s (R-Ky.) campaign this week removed “Rand” sunglasses from its online store after Ray-Ban complained about trademark infringement.
Last weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) claimed he had lobbied Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to let U.S. troops carry their personal firearms around military installations. He had not done so, as McCain — who has a tense relationship with the Texan, whom he once called one of the Senate’s “wacko birds” — gleefully pointed out.
Cruz could only shake his head at the political softball he’d served up.
“Oh, I like John McCain,” Cruz said. “He can always be counted on for a good quote.”
“You’re going to have these small campaign-related gaffes that will be a distraction for a news cycle or two,” said Ryan Williams, a GOP strategist and veteran of Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “You just have to try to limit them so that it doesn’t become a trend that speaks to the competency of your campaign’s operations.”
Of course, the blunders are not limited to first-timers.
The presidential campaign for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is dusting off some cobwebs.
Clinton trekked to Iowa in what she called a “Scooby Doo” van immediately after she officially launched her campaign. The road trip was meant to help the former first lady shake her elitist image. But her failure to tip Chipotle workers at a lunch stop was caught on a security camera, providing fodder for GOP contenders and commanding significant media coverage.
Clinton suffered further blowback after she left the road on Tuesday night on a first-class flight back to Washington.
“A big part of this is the hyper-competitiveness not just in the race for president but also among the media right now,” said GOP strategist Matt Mackowiak. “The campaigns are tracking their opponents and looking to push every slight slip-up around so it gets coverage and embarrasses their opponents and forces them to play defense for a day.”
The gaffes are endlessly frustrating for campaigns, but political strategists say they are also an inevitable part of the game in an era when candidates manage vast networks of political operatives, handle near-constant media demands, and deal with new digital realities.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) had to deal with fallout earlier this year after a trip to London intended to burnish his foreign policy bona fides was overshadowed by reports that he had said it should be up to parents to decide whether or not they vaccinate their children.
The one true political neophyte in the presidential field is retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, a Republican who has never run for any office. His rough edges were exposed in a CNN interview last month in which he said homosexuality is a choice, citing men who enter prison straight but engage in gay sex while incarcerated as evidence .
The encounter stepped on what was supposed to be a big week for Carson — he had launched a presidential exploratory committee a day before — and it provoked him to re-evaluate his media engagement strategy.
Carson said he would no longer pre-record interviews with “liberal” media outlets and swore off talking about issues related to homosexuality.
Paul similarly allowed a verbal exchange to hijack his big presidential announcement week. The morning after the senator launched his campaign for president, he engaged in an ill-advised verbal tussle with “Today” show host Savannah Guthrie. Paul later admitted he lost his cool with the popular morning show anchor.
The exchange had media outlets digging through past interviews of Paul and pulling up other testy exchanges with female reporters. Paul’s wife subsequently stepped in to defend him from sexism charges.
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) has been through the process before — he won the Iowa caucuses in 2008 — and he offered up some unsolicited advice to Paul at the time.
“When you’re running for president, all is fair in love and war,” Huckabee said. “This is war. This is the big leagues.”
While none of the gaffes at this point in the campaign have been game-changers, they upset the delicate ecosystems within a campaign, where political operatives are happiest when they can stay on-message.
“I think the net effect is that it makes these candidates more cautious,” said Mackowiak, who writes for The Hill’s Contributor’s Blog. “Any time they talk they’ll assume someone is recording or will talk to the press afterwards.”
The new realities of the Twitter-dominated era plant even more mines on the battlefield.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) have both lost staff members just days after adding them to their political teams because of controversial tweets uncovered in the wake of the hires.
A technology aide for Bush resigned over old tweets he’d sent that were disparaging to women, while a communications strategist for Walker resigned for tweeting negative things about Iowa.
Minor technology dust-ups take place with even more regularity. Cruz and Bush are among candidates that failed to buy all of the potential domain names associated with their candidacies, opening the door for their opponents to swoop in and redirect Internet traffic to websites promoting immigration reform, ObamaCare or Clinton.
Strategists say the biggest danger is an error that cements a negative perception of a candidate.
Clinton’s sluggish response to the controversy over her use of a personal email account and private server during her time as secretary of State played into attacks from her opponents, who say that she and her husband believe they don’t have to play by the same rules as everyone else.
“The gaffes that matter most are the ones that reinforce existing narratives,” said Mackowiak.
Of course, President Obama has proved that early gaffes are surmountable.
In 2007, just days after announcing his challenge to Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, the then-Illinois senator was on the defensive over comments he made about the lives of U.S. soldiers having been “wasted” in the Iraq War. He quickly apologized, saying he regretted his choice of words and that he’s never felt that American soldiers died in vain in that conflict.
Down the stretch of their epic primary battle, Obama made fewer mistakes than Clinton — and won the nomination.
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