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We love it when politicians collide with real life, especially during election campaigns.

With 24-hour cable news and the unforgiving YouTube, it’s tough for a pol on the trail to do anything stupid without somebody noticing.

Barack Obama said the Iraq war has created a shortage of language translators for Afghanistan, but only about 5000 of the nation’s 32 million people speak Arabic. Obama also said he’s campaigned in 57 states, with one to go. Sens. John McCain and Hillary Clinton commit bloopers too.

Some campaign goofs involve food. Tasting local specialties ranks with wearing funny hats and pretending to be hunters or fishermen.

Remember when Hillary Clinton was in a diner, struggling to get coffee out of a push-button machine? She stared at it, peered behind and around it and said the coffee pot was missing. It was an automatic coffee-squirts-into-a-cup machine. No pot.

Last January, at a Colonel Sanders’ fried chicken place in Pensacola, Mitt Romney pulled the skin off the chicken before he ate it, a faux pas to some southerners.

During the 2000 election campaign, presidential hopeful Gary Bauer embarrassed himself at the Bisquick Pancake Presidential Primary Flip-Off.

Bauer flipped a flapjack into the air, staggered backwards to catch it, fell off the stage and disappeared.

To his credit, he bounded back on stage, waving his spatula in the air as a symbol of something.

When Gerald Ford was campaigning in 1976, he attended a Tex-Mex picnic in San Antonio, Texas.

As Mike Huckabee recalled it for Fox News:

“Ford was handed a tamale and tried to eat it with the shuck on it. And all that weekend every newscast in Texas lead with, ‘President Ford doesn’t know how to eat a tamale.’”

”He lost Texas, and many believe he lost the presidency. Lots of people will believe forever that it was the shuck on the tamale, not Jimmy Carter, that beat Gerald Ford in 1976.”

For non-tamale experts, eating one with the papery shuck on it is comparable to eating a blue crab or lobster shell and all.

Sen. Walter Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s running mate in 1976, is from Minnesota. Having covered Mondale’s entire campaign, I recall that he and his staff groaned whenever Carter summoned them to tiny Plains, Ga. Mondale was a northern liberal, but Democrats tried to change his image in Dixie.

One example was at a low country shrimp boil, a Mondale campaign stop in Beaufort, S.C.

The candidate was handed a plate of shrimp. He promptly ate one, with the shell still on it. It made the network TV news that night. Mondale hoped that would be his last gaff while looking for votes in the south.

Remember when President George H. W. Bush threw up at a diplomatic dinner in Japan? Remember Michael Dukakis in that tank, looking like Alfred E. Newman in that helmet?

Remember the current president, swearing with his mouth full during a banquet conversation with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair?

I’m hoping one of the major candidates commits a faux pas doozy in the few days left. That way, maybe we’ll have something to smile about next Tuesday night.

E-mail Don Farmer at don@donfarmer.com