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While Clinton's defense of guns didn't entirely ring true, Obama's confusing a six-shooter with a hunting rifle worsened his trouble with the gun crowd (or so I've read; I'm not going to pretend I knew the difference).
Has it actually? I read his comment as being intentionally sarcastic — only someone who "didn't know guns" would bring an Annie Get Your Gun Wild-West style pistol on a hunting trip. Trying to explain it any other way seems like a reach.
But that just illustrates the one aspect of the current flap that Joan Walsh doesn't really address — or rather she starts to, but on which she doesn't completely follow through.
... gaffes have staying power when they seem to represent not merely a poor choice of words, but an unsettling underlying truth about the speaker.
There's certainly some truth to this, but it also works the other way — by controlling the political narrative it becomes possible to, essentially, control the very course of events. For instance, John McCain can lie like a rug — like lying is going out of style — but in a sense it "doesn't happen," because the press won't acknowledge it. So compelling is this narrative, in fact, that John Judis can say with a straight face that McCain's chief inherent liability is ... his age.
Obama on the other hand can speak an essential (if badly phrased) truth about class and American society — or Hillary Clinton can exaggerate for dramatic effect a story which, by and large, did otherwise actually happen the way she told it — and suddenly the candidates are impaled on the skewer of supposed liberal insincerity.
Sorry, I don't buy that those are "underlying truths." It's underlying, all right, but it's not truth — and the liberal political establishment, whatever else its faults, didn't put it there.
