So much of politics is scripted, focused-grouped and calculated that when a political professional says or does something out of the ordinary, absurd or just plain stupid, we often smack ourselves upside the head and say, “What were they thinking?”

While we could pick any number of examples, today we focus on three recent forehead slappers by Barack Obama, Fred Davis and Jerry Brown.

What was Obama thinking when he endorsed Democratic Congressman Pete Stark for re-election last week?

As we noted the other day, the 20-term East Bay congressman is an embarrassment to himself and his constituents and ought to withdraw and throw his support to Democratic Alameda county prosecutor Eric Swalwell who has the advantage of being 1) sane and 2) not a drooler and 3) verbalizer of the line that Stark’s behavior has “forced the congressman to issue more public apologies than Lindsay Lohan.”

In recent days – before Obama’s bonehead endorsement – Stark falsely and maliciously accused Deborah “The Red” Saunders, the SF Chronicle’s in-house token conservative columnist, of donating money to Swalwell’s campaign. He idiotically confused Solyndra, the belly-up solar energy company, with Tesla, the electric car company, both in his district.

And Stark issued a phony “apology” for having charged that Swalwell took hundreds of thousands of dollars in “bribes” in a statement that went on to charge that “Swalwell has been a consistent vote on the Dublin City Council and on the Planning Commission supporting projects by developers who have been raided by the FBI, have plead guilty to destroying natural habitats.”

Sorry, indeed.

What kind of political advice did Obama get on this one? Did no one read the 2008 Esquire list of the 10 worst lawmakers in Congress in which they noted, “Stark gives bumbling, dyspeptic old fools who say stupid things a bad name.”

By: Calbuzz
Source: http://www.calbuzz.com/2012/05/calbuzz-solves-mysteries-of-the-political-universe/