Early on 10 November, a blurb near the top of the New York Times home page said, “Rick Perry’s failure to name a third federal agency he would cut was the [Michigan presidential] debate’s most memorable moment.” That agency was the Department of Energy, an organization with obvious multifaceted importance to science.
The blurb linked to the article “ ‘Oops’ and a long, sad pause at debate when Perry can’t get to three” (since revised to “After ‘oops’ in debate, Perry says he’ll stay in race”). The piece reported generally on the 9 November Republican presidential debate in Rochester, Michigan—but it spotlighted the Texas governor's brain freeze.
This excerpt conveys the gist:
[Gov. Perry] declared that he planned to eliminate three government agencies in Washington. But as he began to explain, he could think of only two.
“Commerce, Education,” Mr. Perry said before pausing for an uncomfortable moment as he looked from side to side, counting on his fingers and flipping through his notes. As his rivals volunteered suggestions, a moderator asked Mr. Perry if he could name the third agency.
“The third one, I can’t,” he finally said, a sad look on his face, after 53 seconds had gone by. “Sorry. Oops.”
Later the Times report added, “It was not until several minutes later, when he received another turn, that he explained himself, saying: ‘By the way, that was the Department of Energy I was reaching for a while ago.’ ”
Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. His reports to AIP are collected each Friday for 'Science and the media.' He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
