It’s so hard. You try to be funny – or to make fun – and it all comes out the wrong way.

Yesterday, John Kerry said:

“You know, education – if you make the most of it – you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

Oops!

Then Bush responded:

“The Senator’s suggestion that the men and women of our military are somehow uneducated is insulting and shameful. The members of the United States military are plenty smart and plenty brave, and the Senator from Massachusetts owes them an apology.”

Kerry fires back:

“This pathetic attempt to distort a botched joke about President Bush is a shameful effort to distract from a botched war.”

Apparently Kerry was trying to say that Bush is stuck in Iraq, not uneducated soldiers. But it didn’t necessarily come out that way.

The circumstance begs the question: What is the best course of action when you really screw up – even if it’s not your fault?

The short answer is that it depends.

Legions are calling for him to apologize. GOP is all over it. It’s spiraling out of control.

In PR schoolins, we learned about how Edward Bernays was paid a whole boatload of money just to say “do nothing.”

In this case, however, you’d think it makes sense for Kerry to apologize. But he hasn’t yet. He’s battened down the hatches and is toughing it out to buy time and plan a course of action. He knows that he’ll have to take some punches, but is hoping that the time spent coming up with a strategy about how to overcome the situation outweighs the risk of saying something now.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 31st, 2006 at 9:57 pm and is filed under PR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.