Dan By Dan Quayle

Power Line’s Scott Johnson catches Barack Obama touring Mount Rushmore:

He express[ed] curiosity about the filming of a chase scene in “North by Northwest,” Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 classic starring Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint that included a death-defying scramble over Rushmore’s presidential faces.

“How did they get up there in the first place?” he asked ranger Wesley Jensen.

“They didn’t. It was a movie set,” Jensen told him.

“Pretty spiffy, isn’t it,” said the Illinois senator, summing up his overall impressions.

As Scott writes, “Kids say the darndest things.”

These gaffes are particularly damning to Obama though, because of his ridiculously messianic early expectations:

I wonder if Obama as gaffe machine will have legs outside the Blogosphere and conservative op-ed columns, though. At least this one is on record before it’s deleted with a jump cut.