Correcting Misspeak-Obama Provides an Example

Give enough speeches and eventually you will misspeak. And certainly presidential candidates give enough speeches. This past Sunday it happened to Senator Barack Obama.

At a campaign stop at Iowa State University, Obama said,

"We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged--and to which we now have spent $400 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted."

Later on Sunday Obama issued a statement apologizing for his remark about the troops.

"I was actually upset with myself. Their sacrifices are never wasted; that was sort of a slip of the tongue as I was speaking."

Yesterday at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, Obama again apologized. He said he had intended to criticize the civilian leadership of the war, not the military.

"Even as I said it, I realized I had misspoken. It is not at all what I intended to say, and I would absolutely apologize if any (military families) felt that in some ways it had diminished the enormous courage and sacrifice that they'd shown."

So how did Senator Obama do in correcting his mistake?

I give him a C. Here's why.

There are three major categories of misspeak:

1. You use a word or phrase when in fact you mean to say something else and you are unaware you've made a mistake. (Some listeners attribute great significance to the mistake, viewing it as a Freudian slip, but I think many mistakes are just slips of the tongue, not of the psyche.)
2. You say something that does express your real feelings but is inappropriate to say.
3. You say something that is inappropriate, but it is an attempt to say one thing that gets twisted in delivery.

Obama's error is either category 2 or 3. Which one really doesn't matter for our purposes. The key element is he was aware of the error as he was saying it. Rather than go on, he should have stopped immediately and corrected the remark.

Lesson: If you misspeak in a major way, that is, say something that is likely to create its own story and detract from your intended result, correct it as close to the occurrence as possible. Every minute the error lingers, the more it takes on a life of its own.