{"id":10914,"date":"2008-01-30T19:33:03","date_gmt":"2008-01-31T03:33:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/neology\/2008\/01\/30\/two-americans.html"},"modified":"2008-01-30T19:33:03","modified_gmt":"2008-01-31T03:33:03","slug":"two-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/2008\/01\/30\/two-americans\/","title":{"rendered":"Two Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Entertaining mistake, from a statement by Barack Obama about Edwards dropping out of the race:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply ... that two Americans can become one.<\/p>\n<p>--Blog entry \"<a href=\"http:\/\/time-blog.com\/real_clear_politics\/2008\/01\/more_on_edwards.html\">More on Edwards<\/a>,\" retrieved 30 January 2008, 3:28 p.m. Pacific time<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>This was very widely quoted, and then very widely corrected--within a few hours after the quote appeared in dozens or hundreds of articles and blogs, it had virtually disappeared from the web.<\/p>\n<p>Took me a while to track down the source of the error: the <a href=\"http:\/\/embeds.blogs.foxnews.com\/2008\/01\/30\/obama-on-edwards-dropping-out-of-the-race\/\">video of Obama's statement<\/a> shows him saying, to a crowd at a Denver rally, \"John and Elizabeth Edwards believe deeply that two Americans can become--that the two Americas can become one.\" (Starting around 0:50 in that video.)<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/politics\/war_room\/2008\/01\/30\/obama_edwards\/index.html\">Salon blog entry<\/a> explains that the Obama campaign sent out an email version of the statement that had it as \"Americans.\" Clearly someone made a mistake somewhere. I wonder if Obama was reading from a teleprompter that contained a typo, and if the words on the prompter were from the same text source as the email that went out. Seems like the alternative would be that a staffer transcribed the statement from the speech but left the error intact, which seems unlikely.<\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/my.barackobama.com\/page\/community\/post\/samgrahamfelsen\/CGjZy\">Obama website<\/a> now gives it as \"two Americas\"; don't know whether that was originally posted as \"Americans\" and then corrected or not. Note also that the printed text has an extra phrase in the middle, a phrase Obama didn't say in the spoken version: \"John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply that we can change this--that two Americas can become one.\" This leads me even more strongly to suspect that Obama was reading from a printed source (and modifying it on the fly), even though I had always thought he generally spoke without a prompter.<\/p>\n<p>I don't mean to make a big fuss about this; people make mistakes, and typos, all the time. What made it worth an entry is that (a) it's funny, and (b) it was <em>very<\/em> widely reported for a brief time--and none of the articles that reported it seemed to notice the mistake.  And (c) I'm intrigued by the ephemerality of the web--the fact that an error like this can be expunged so quickly that there remains very little evidence that it happened.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Entertaining mistake, from a statement by Barack Obama about Edwards dropping out of the race: John and Elizabeth Edwards have always believed deeply &#8230; that two Americans can become one&#8230;.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10914","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-errors"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10914","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10914"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10914\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10914"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10914"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10914"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}