BY TERRY ROSS, Director, News and Information Center, The Sun

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is a well-practiced speaker, so she doesn’t tend to make many public mistakes. But she did recently, and it was a doozy.

Napolitano was an early and ardent supporter of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. She has been going around the nation stumping for him and was doing just that the other day in El Paso, Texas.

She was talking to a group at the University of Texas in El Paso and did something that left her audience in stunned silence - she endorsed Sen. John McCain instead of Barack Obama.

According to Capitol Media Services in Phoenix, the El Paso paper quoted the governor as saying, “If you want change in Washington, D.C., and if you want to hear a new voice and new vision in D.C., you are picking John McCain.”

She realized her error and corrected it, but it made for a light moment at what was probably a pretty dry political event.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 11th, 2008 at 8:48 am and is filed under Editor's Notebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.