Romney Campaign Makes Third Spelling Gaffe in a Week: It’s ‘Offical’

If you were running a major presidential campaign that just got slammed for misspelling America as “Amercia”, you might ask your staff to go through your campaign literature with a fine-tooth comb.

Especially your online campaign literature, where mistakes could be erased in seconds. At the very least, you might give your much-viewed Facebook presence a once-over.

Not so Mitt Romney. Less than a week after the Amercia gaffe, another two major spelling mistakes have emerged in the Romney campaign — one of them front and center on the candidate’s Facebook page.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Romney’s campaign store — the third link on his Facebook page, which has received more than 1.8 million Likes — lets you know you can buy the candidate’s “offical” gear.

The typo was first spotted by alert Twitter user @typohunter, an anonymous grammar fiend based in San Diego. And it’s becoming part of a pattern.

Also on Facebook this weekend, the Romney campaign offered readers a “sneak-peak” [sic] at the candidate’s forthcoming TV ad:

That ad has since been removed. But “offical” remains, front and center on Facebook. (If you click through to the store, meanwhile, “official” is spelled correctly.)

Of course, for most of us — English teachers excluded — none of this exactly rises to the level of high crimes and misdemeanors. At most, Romney is guilty of not hiring a good copy editor. (Then again, how bad a speller does Romney’s social media manager have to be to not notice a mistake that prominent on Facebook?)

But image matters in presidential elections, more than it does anywhere else. When similar mistakes happen three times in the same week, it creates an expectation that can be hard to shift. Expect Romney’s spelling skills to become the butt of late-night talk show jokes. Dan Quayle can attest, and he only made one such prominent error (“potatoe”).

It’s also a problem when the candidate has spoken frequently of the urgent need to fix the U.S. education system. Romney also had this to say earlier this year to the American Society of News Editors: “Frankly, in some of the new media, I find myself missing the presence of editors to exercise quality control.”

Do you think spelling makes a difference when it comes to your online presence? Let us know in the comments.