Voters Hearing Countless Ways of Saying ‘Sorry’

[rodeodance]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/01/washington/01apology.html?_r=1&th=&oref=slogin&emc=th&pagewanted=print

September 1, 2006
Political Memo
Voters Hearing Countless Ways of Saying ‘Sorry’
By MARK LEIBOVICH

WASHINGTON, Aug. 31 — These are sorry days in American politics.

The Maryland comptroller, William Donald Schaefer, a former governor and Baltimore mayor, released a radio advertisement on Wednesday in which he apologized to anyone he had offended in his 50-year career, sins that ranged from ogling a woman at a public meeting to complaining that immigrants were not learning English fast enough.

Senator Conrad Burns, Republican of Montana, said Wednesday that the United States confronts a “faceless enemy” of terrorists who “drive cabs in the daytime and kill at night.” Despite a hail of criticism on Thursday, Mr. Burns has not apologized for this remark as he did after complaining in July that a group of firefighters did not do a “goddamn thing” to stop a wildfire east of Billings.

Senator George Allen, Republican of Virginia, has been serially apologizing across Virginia since demeaning a man of Indian descent as “Macaca, or whatever his name is” at a campaign rally last month. Mr. Allen has been perhaps the most prodigious apologizer in what has been a spate of groveling across the political spectrum.

The contrite caucus includes Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans (who said he was “very sorry” after calling the site of the World Trade Center a “hole in the ground”); Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., Democrat of Delaware, (who asked forgiveness after a C-Span microphone caught him saying “you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin’ Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent”); a Florida Republican Congressional candidate, Tramm Hudson (who might have sunk his campaign by saying that blacks were bad swimmers); and Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, a Republican, (after using the term “tar baby” not long after the White House spokesman, Tony Snow, deployed the same phrase, which some consider to be a racist epithet).......