Still talking about this?

On a campaign stop during the 2008 United States presidential election, then-Senator Barack Obama stated that he'd been to 57 states and that he had one left to visit. Looking at this video, he most likely meant to say "47 states" and was referring to the contiguous 48; the "50" likely originated in his speech because most Americans are used to talking about the "50 states", which caused him to say "57". Not a big deal, right?

To the vast majority of people, no, it's not a big deal: politicians make errors in speech all the time. At the end of the day, they are human and humans frequently make slips of the tongue. Bizarrely, while it's been six years since Obama made the error, I still see it be cited in some Internet commenters. Usually, it's by brought up by someone who is spouting nonsensical talking points about Obama or is losing an argument about him and has decided to fall back upon something irrelevant as to disrupt their opponent's train of thought.

Why does anyone care (or, for that matter, still remember) some verbal error Obama made during his first presidential campaign? How is it relevant now that he's serving his second term as president? If someone is an Obama critic and their main criticism of him is about a gaffe he made before he was elected, then they're implying that he's been an excellent president.

Why is that the case? Because by focusing on some silly mistake he made during his first campaign, they are giving the impression that this one error is more serious than anything he's ever done as president. I'm a long-term Obama supporter but there are some actions he's taken as president with which I disagree; if supporters of Obama can agree that there are legitimate reasons to criticize him, then anyone whose strongest rationale against him is a minor and irrelevant pre-presidential misspeak is an ineffective critic. I've read and heard countless criticisms of Obama that I consider nonsensical and irrelevant, but this is by far one of the stupidest.

The continued citing of the 57 states gaffe is one of the reasons why I rarely read Internet comments now (besides, of course, the time wasted in reading them). While I have observed it be used less frequently in recent months, this can be attributed to my cutback of reading comments.