Foot-in-Mouth Disease

Charlie Black, a longtime Republican activist who served as an adviser to Ronald Reagan and is currently an adviser to presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain, stepped into the proverbial briar patch this week.

Black said it would be a "big advantage" for McCain if the United States was the target of another terrorist attack. McCain said he "strenuously" disagreed with Black.

This strikes me as being similar to Hillary Clinton's remark about the Bobby Kennedy assassination to the editorial board of the Sioux Falls (S.D.) Argus Leader about a month ago.

Both remarks were accurate. But they dealt with facts that most people prefer not to think about.

All available evidence indicates that Barack Obama is perceived by the public to be better able to handle the Iraq War and a whole list of domestic matters. But voters believe McCain is better when it comes to terrorism in general.

So it doesn't take a genius to figure out that if the voters are concerned about putting gas in their tanks, that works in Obama's favor.

But if the voters just saw the Sears Tower collapse like the World Trade Center before going to the polls, that works in McCain's favor.

For that matter, I suppose, it wouldn't have to be anything as visually dramatic as seeing a huge tower collapse. Something just as deliberate but more long-term — like another anthrax scare — might do the trick.

For political purposes, that might even be preferable.

Everyone has his/her private fears, I suppose. Everyone's afraid of something.

And I guess one of the things that most Americans fear — once they get past their individual fears of being stricken by cancer or a heart attack or whichever potentially fatal condition they fear the most — is living through another 9-11.

Now, that doesn't mean that many of us haven't thought about the possibility of something terrible happening. In fact, for some of us, I'm sure a year hasn't gone by since 2001 without thoughts — however fleeting they may be — of another equally horrific attack.

But decorum demands that we don't talk about it.

This episode with Black reminds me of the Republican candidate for governor here in Texas in 1990. His name was Clayton Williams, and he was the front-runner to be elected through much of that election cycle.

But Williams had a tendency to shoot himself in the foot — frequently. In fact, Williams shot himself in the foot so often that my father liked to say that his weapon of choice was a machine gun.

And by the day of the election, the Democratic candidate — you may have heard of her, her name was Ann Richards — pulled off a narrow victory. The day after the election, the now-defunct Dallas Times-Herald summed it up with this headline: "She Whups Him!"

There are some differences here, of course. For one thing, Black isn't the candidate, McCain is. Such an indiscretion is not a good thing, but it's not as serious if it comes from an adviser and not the candidate himself.

And McCain is not the acknowledged front-runner, as Williams was.

But the path to becoming the front-runner gets steeper and rockier if your advisers insist on making remarks like the one Black made.

McCain cannot afford to retain advisers who put their feet in their mouths.