Rick Perlstein, a elegant and perceptive left leaning writer, wrote a breathtaking account of sixties era polarization called “Nixonland”, which he marred only at the end by weirdly inquiring whether American ideological opposites secretly wish to kill each other. The answer is emphatically no, but based on the two most infamous “gaffes” of this cycle—Mitt Romney on the untaxed lower and working class and Barack Obama on the parentage of successful businesses—the truth might be that they would just happily tax the hell out of the other side.

In fairness, which inadvertent coining of a catch phrase, “the 47 percent”, or “You didn’t build that” lives on as a classic terminal wound, and which ends up being peripheral noise, is entirely unclear at week’s end: Gallup’s tracking poll still shows the race deadlocked; on the other hand, a flurry of other state by state polls this week showed more good news than not for Barack Obama, who leads in every large swing state even as a battery of smaller state polls remain in a statistical tie. And there is a lot of fog in this race, more than usual even by the standard of instant, all-day news and Twitter.

But it is striking that this year’s verbal blunders are different in kind and nature from their ancestors in prior races: John McCain’s “the economy is fundamentally sound” during the week Lehman Brothers capsized; John Kerry’s “I voted for it before I voted against it”, George W. Bush’s “do they think Social Security is some kind of federal program?” ranged from the inarticulate to the clumsy, to the horribly timed, but not one of them seemed to reflect any footprints around a larger ideological perspective.  Rather than being hints of a future program, they were backfires from notably uneloquent politicians trying to riff their way through a lull in their prepared texts.

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Artur Davis: The War of Gaffes