Wallace Apologizes for 'Flake' Question to Bachmann

Chris Wallace's interview with Michele Bachmann on Fox News Sunday is resonating in part because he asked her, "Are you a flake?" The host has since apologized. "I messed up. I'm sorry," he says in a post-show video, notes the Hot Air blog. "I didn't mean any disrespect." Wallace says he meant only to raise a point that Bachmann's critics use, and he praised her "strong answer" to it. Bachmann seemed "perturbed" by the bluntness of the question, he says, and viewers gave him an earful. "If my question got in the way of what I think is a good interview, as I say, I didn't do it right." (See the clips of his explanation and of the original question and response in the video gallery.)

Fair enough, adds Hot Air's Ed Morrissey. "He deduced—rightly—that having the question overshadow the answer in an interview is usually a mistake, and accepted it as such." Michelle Malkin's take: "When I think of political figures who have made questionable statements and embarrassing gaffes in the past few days, Michele Bachmann isn’t the name that springs to mind, but she’s obviously the candidate in this race so far who is going to be unfairly tagged as the gaffey one." (More Chris Wallace stories.)