Everybody knows the story. Another sad impostor in the long line of presidential candidates who try to emulate the Normals, George H.W. Bush walked into a grocery store one day in 1992 and blew his Joe Sixpack cover story by marveling at the futuristic wonder that was the store’s decade-old bar code scanning technology. Everybody knows this story because it was a perfect illustration of the thickness of the White House bubble. What many people don’t seem to know about this story is that it is completely false. It was a grocers’ convention, not a store; and according to every eyewitness account, Bush wasn’t completely blown away by the scanners, which were in fact of a new, innovative variety. The other version spread because of a New York Times article the following day by a reporter who wasn’t there. (The Times did get the location right–transposing the story to a supermarket happened later.) Despite a lot of people’s best efforts, the fiction became legend — one of the stickiest myths in U.S. political history. I’ve met plenty of people who still believe it. They’re out there. And some of them even work in the news business. MSNBC’s estimable Andrea Mitchell is apparently one of them. On Monday she introduced a clip of Mitt Romney by remarking, “Maybe this was Mitt Romney’s supermarket scanner moment.” It was and it wasn’t. The clip seemed like the Bush Myth all over again: At a rally in Pennsylvania, Romney professed amazement at a local convenience store’s touchscreen sandwich ordering doohicky, a mainstay of Sheetz’s, Wawa’s and other fine dining establishments for many years. And not unlike the Bush Myth, context spoiled the whole story. Romney was just making a point about (yawn) burdensome regulation. The full clip made it pretty clear he wasn’t about to invest heavily in hoagie robots any time soon. But in one very important way, Romney’s Wawaterloo (we’re calling it that, right?) was completely different: No one is going to remember it. The news cycle chewed up the myth and … Continue reading Why There Aren’t Supermarket Scanner Moments Anymore