In case you haven't noticed, the 2008 presidential campaign is underway. There's even been a sighting of the first official, MSM-sanctioned campaign gaffe.*

Seattle will get its first visit by an (almost) presidential candidate when Sen. John McCain drops in Feb. 23. The Arizona Republican will deliver a lunch speech to a joint lunch meeting of the Seattle City Club and the World Affairs Council. The speech is billed as "His vision for the United States' role in the world."

McCain's campaign is still officially in the exploratory phase and he doesn't seem to be in any hurry to formally declare. He was popular in Washington state when he ran for president in 2000. He finished second to George W. Bush in the Republican presidential primary, but a clear first among voters who chose the "unaffiliated," or independent, presidential primary ballot.

Local McCain boosters had the only visible presence at last week's meeting of the Republican Party State Committee. Chris Fidler, who co-chaired McCain's 2000 campaign in the state, is again signed on. He was manning a table with literature aimed at the Republican faithful, including McCain's "talking points on immigration" and background on his "continuing commitment to life."

*I think it's fair to call Biden's comments a gaffe. But I remember talking to Howard Dean backstage of Town Hall in early 2004 when he was repeatedly being tagged with a series of gaffes, missteps, or whatever the parlance of the day was. Dean didn't think his comments deserved that, and he was particularly ticked off that what he said about the capture of Saddam Hussein was being called a gaffe.

Dean had said the U.S. military's capture of Saddam hadn't made the United States safer. I don't have my notes of that interview, but Dean's point was that the media and the political class are too quick to label something a gaffe. John Kerry had attacked him for the comments, saying it showed Dean didn't have, among other things, the "diplomatic temperament necessary to lead this country through dangerous times."

The urge to label gaffes is strong. We in the media crave them as much as a good flip-flop. Campaign coverage at times can seem like little more than a chronicling of missteps. Even Dean's own staff got into the act, according to a New York Times story from January 2004 about the candidate's problems in Iowa:

Yet the concerns voiced in interviews come during a rough month for Dr. Dean: what his own aides have described as political missteps — such as saying that the capture of Saddam Hussein had not made the United States safer — have coincided with a stretch of time when many voters in Iowa are making decisions.

Is it a gaffe when your staff calls your comments a misstep? (I'm sure that story was written somewhere.)

At the time, Dean had taken to paraphrasing Michael Kinsley's definition of a gaffe. As he told Newsweek in '04:

There's a lot of stuff that gets totally jerked around. All this stuff about Dean says things that are gaffes — the definition of a gaffe in Washington is somebody who tells that truth but shouldn't have.

Worth keeping in mind.