GOP presidential candidate Rick Perry shrugged off a gaffe he made concerning the legal voting age on Tuesday as a simple human error.
Speaking a day after he mistakenly said that the voting age was 21 and that the 2012 presidential election is on Nov. 12 (it’s Nov. 6), Perry said everyone makes mistakes sometimes.
“From time to time we all will get something wrong — the president of the United States said there was 57 states one day,
” Perry said Wednesday on Fox News.
The gaffe was only the latest in a series of missteps for the Perry campaign that have garnered a great deal of attention.
During a debate in early November, Perry tried to list three government departments that he would cut as president but forgot the third one. The Republican Texas governor said the media’s attention to both Tuesday’s gaffe and the one during the debate was the result of efforts by political observers to distract from more substantive issues.
“Generally speaking, of my 10-plus years as governor of Texas, when someone doesn’t want to talk about the substantive issues, when they don’t want to talk about the flat tax that I’ve laid out, when they don’t want to talk about a major overhaul of D.C. like going to a part-time Congress — which most of the states operate very well with — they want to find some error and talk about that,” Perry said.
“Look, I’m a human being. I’m going to make some mistakes sometime in my remarks.”
