If you were to play the old word-association game with the name "Mori" today, chances are most people would instantly think "gaffe" (in Japanese, "shitsugen").

Since the prime minister took office 11 months ago, there has hardly been a newspaper article about him in which that word hasn't been linked with his name almost as often as "Yoshiro." At the same time, across the Pacific, presidential candidate-turned-President George W. Bush has been busy burnishing his own gaffe-a-day image. The term pops up so often as a synonym for "Bushism" no one has questioned its use. And yet the one man is fighting to stay in office while the other rode his verbal blunders right into the White House. Why?

The answer has been obscured by the near-criminal overuse of this handy word "gaffe," which has created the impression that Mr. Mori is being pilloried (or, as Mr. Bush says, "pillared") for things the new American president is getting away with. In fact, the kinds of things that have earned the two men their trouble-prone reputations can only be yoked together as gaffes if the term is stretched almost beyond meaning. Whatever you call them, Mr. Mori's controversial characterization of Japan as "a nation of the gods with the Emperor at its center" and Mr. Bush's charge that Vice President Al Gore's tax plan would require "numerous IRA agents" are not even remotely comparable. Yet these remarks pretty much encapsulate the kinds of misstatement the two leaders tend to make. They can't both be gaffes. Maybe neither of them is.