The Scratch An Itch syndrome

At first glance it's a little hard to understand: how could a presumably sophisticated political campaigner be so careless in an interview as to get his candidate into trouble?

I refer, of course, to the Etch A Sketch gaffe. It demonstrates the predicament a spokesman encounters trying to explain the soundbites that the candidate spits out like sunflower seeds. The interviewers are looking for mistatements, contradictions -- anything -- they can turn into headlines and leads.

Too often one feels like a punching bag. Eventually you want to punch back with your own soundbite.

It reminded me of an incident years ago when one of my PR colleagues at the telephone company was asked to react to the biting criticism of a legislator. "I didn't know he was running for office," the spokesman replied to the consternation of the company's executives, except for one who just shrugged.

"We pay him (the hapless spokesman) to take the reporters' abuse," the exec sighed. "We send him into the ring and tell him to take the fall. He gets tired of losing. Once in a while he just wants to win."

Same with the Etch A Sketch victim. Tired of having to continually obfuscate, equivocate and prevaricate, he was itching to show he could be as glib as anyone. Probably his biggest mistake was to use such a catchy, visual reference as Etch A Sketch.

For any reporter, making something out of that was child's play.