While I was traveling, Ken Buck was caught, not knowing he was being recorded, calling those Tea Party members who ask him questions about Barack Obama’s birth place and birth certificate “dumbasses".

Jane Norton pounced on the question, implying that Buck was basically slamming the Tea Party while trying to claim their mantle for his race.

Buck says, of course, that he was just talking about the so-called “birthers".

My take is that they’re both stretching the truth.

I don’t think Buck was talking about the Tea Party broadly when he called some of its members “dumbasses", as Mrs. Norton suggested, but I thought it was interesting that he implied that all birthers are Tea Party members, and thus that the Tea Party is an attractor for many with out-of-the-mainstream ideas.

So, while Buck’s comment certainly wasn’t meant as an insult to the entire Tea Party movement, I do think that in an unintended way (and perhaps not understood by Jane Norton either), it did show some lack of understanding of or appreciation for the Tea Party movement.

For the record, I think there is a greater-than-zero but less than 50/50 chance that Barack Obama was not born in the US and is not eligible to be our president.  I think there is a much more than 50/50 chance that there are things in his records which he does not want the public to see because they’ll show that he got whatever advantages he could by doing things as a foreigner, perhaps such as scholarships for schools.

The most transparent president in history, as he fashions himself, is the most closed book we’ve seen in a long time.

In the meantime, I doubt Ken Buck’s gaffe will hurt him very much…except, perhaps, with those voters who are indeed “birthers” and don’t like being called names for having suspicions which, while politically inconvenient for Buck to discuss, are not totally beyond reason.

I don’t have a prediction as to which way this race is going, but I doubt that annoying a few “birthers” will be the difference in the race.  If Norton is successful in painting Buck’s comment as more broadly anti-Tea Party, that could be a bigger factor, but I think that’s rather unlikely.  Also, a lot of people have probably mailed ballots in already, so these things are becoming less significant.