Politico has a story about the media calling every Obama flub, real or imagined, his "first mistake." Though this sort of meta-media-analysis is just a pleasant sideshow for political obsessives, the fact that each mistake becomes the president-elect's first testifies that most of what journalists are calling mistakes are so minor or non-existent that we forget about them the next week. As Joe Lockhart, press guru, tells the reporter: "If you put 10 reporters in a room and asked them to write down what’s Obama’s biggest mistake, I guarantee there would be no consensus — which means they haven’t made a big mistake."
But I want to note with ironic pride that it's we at the Prospect who get called out as the earliest first-mistakers:
First-flub spotting has become something of a national pastime since Nov. 4, with the press floating trial balloons as the first victory balloons hit the ground.
On Nov. 5, the American Prospect wondered whether reports that Obama was considering Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Environmental Protection Agency might qualify as his “first mistake.”
The article references this blog post by Sam Boyd, published the day after the election, which refers to rumors -- insane in retrospect -- about Robert Kennedy Jr. becoming EPA chief as "Obama's first mistake." And so TAPPED takes its place in history.
-- Tim Fernholz
