If you were running a major presidential campaign that just got slammed for misspelling America as "Amercia", you might ask your staff to go through your campaign literature with a fine-tooth comb.
Especially your online campaign literature, where mistakes could be erased in seconds. At the very least, you might give your much-viewed Facebook presence a once-over.
Not so Mitt Romney. Less than a week after the Amercia gaffe, another two major spelling mistakes have emerged in the Romney campaign — one of them front and center on the candidate's Facebook page.
As you can see in the screenshot above, Romney's campaign store — the third link on his Facebook page, which has received more than 1.8 million Likes — lets you know you can buy the candidate's "offical" gear. [UPDATED: Shortly after this story published, the link was removed.]
The typo was first spotted by alert Twitter user @typohunter, the nom de Twitter of San Diego developer and proofreader Kari Embree. And it's becoming part of a pattern.
Also on Facebook this weekend, the Romney campaign offered readers a "sneak-peak" [sic] at the candidate's forthcoming TV ad:
That ad has since been removed. But "offical" remains, front and center on Facebook. (If you click through to the store, meanwhile, "official" is spelled correctly.)
Of course, for most of us — English teachers excluded — none of this exactly rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. At most, Romney is guilty of not hiring a good copy editor. (Then again, how bad a speller does Romney's social media manager have to be to not notice a mistake that prominent on Facebook?)
But image matters in presidential elections, more than it does anywhere else. When similar mistakes happen three times in the same week, it creates an expectation that can be hard to shift. Expect Romney's spelling skills to become the butt of late-night talk show jokes. Dan Quayle can attest, and he only made one such prominent error ("potatoe").
It's also a problem when the candidate has spoken frequently of the urgent need to fix the U.S. education system. Romney also had this to say earlier this year to the American Society of News Editors: "Frankly, in some of the new media, I find myself missing the presence of editors to exercise quality control."
Do you think spelling makes a difference when it comes to your online presence? Let us know in the comments.
In case you couldn't find the typo, this photo clearly illustrates it.
Eric Fehrnstrom, Romney's senior campaign adviser, has stated about the campaign: "It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again."
We bet they wish they could shake one now.
In this viral photoshopped image, Romney's children spell out Rmoney, not Romney.
Romney's digital team really could have used spell check. Or a dictionary.
The guy holding the sign in the back has a message for Romney, but it seems he needs an editor too.
Just sotp with all the typos already.
Sometimes it's just best to look it up first.
We imagine this is what Romney's digital team looked like after discovering the gaffe.
Ralph is for a better Amercia, of course.
Mercia was one of the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy. It was centred on the valley of the River Trent and its tributaries in the region now known as the English Midlands. The name is a Latinisation of the Old English Mierce or Myrce, meaning "border people". - Wikipedia
Romney "clenched" the nomination for president of Amercia. Interesting.
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