(FORTUNE Magazine) – Today, as Mr. Dole's intimates review his campaign, they look back upon an astonishing array of missed opportunities . . . Many of the campaign's problems emerged into public view in the critical days following Mr. Dole's impressive triumph in the Iowa caucuses. That night, ) a number of Dole intimates . . . speculated that their candidate was vulnerable . . . to charges that he was an advocate of taxes. They decided that he ought to make a pre-emptive strike by ''taking the pledge'' . . . to veto attempts to raise income-tax rates . . . Such an ad, titled ''No Taxes,'' was shot at a GOP dinner in Nashua. But Mr. Dole was tired, and instead of saying that he would veto attempts . . . to eliminate the lower taxes of the Reagan era, he said that he would veto any attempts to ''lower taxes.'' -- From an article in the Wall Street Journal.

In . . . significant cases, it is . . . a self-criticism, an internal contradiction against one's own utterances, which causes the speech-blunder . . . We then observe with surprise how the wording of an assertion removes the purposes of the same, and how the error in speech lays bare the inner dishonesty. Here the lapsus linguae becomes . . . a means of self-betrayal. -- From Psychopathology of Everyday Life, by Sigmund Freud.