By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff

John McCain ’s campaign has been wandering through an electronic communications minefield in recent days, and a top aide to the Republican presidential nominee accidentally detonated another blast Tuesday morning — by suggesting McCain “helped create” the wireless electronic device known by the brand name BlackBerry during the Arizona senator’s tenure as a member and former chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee.

The incident, sparked by McCain campaign policy director Douglas J. Holtz-Eakin and first reported on the Politico Web site, is reminiscent of a similar one involving 2000 Democratic presidential nominee Al Gore, one that damaged his campaign by giving him the appearance of inflating his achievements. Gore then said he, as a technologically savvy senator, had worked to abet the development of the Internet, which was a defensible statement. But this was twisted into a distorted claim, but one widely broadcast and lampooned, that Gore said he had “invented” the Internet.

Holtz-Eakin stirred these memories Tuesday as he held up his BlackBerry before reporters and said, “Telecommunications of the United States is a premier innovation in the past 15 years, comes right through the Commerce Committee. So you’re looking at the miracle John McCain helped create, and that’s what he did.”

McCain’s campaign didn’t even try to back it up.

Asked what legislation McCain had worked on that might be used to justify the claim, McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds dismissed the comments by Holtz-Eakin, a former Congressional Budget Office director, as a bad turn at stand-up comedy by an adviser and nothing personally claimed by the candidate.

“It was a joke by a staffer. People need to lighten up. John McCain heard about the comment and laughed himself. He isn’t laying claim to inventing anything, much less a Blackberry,” said Bounds. “Our policy advisor is clearly better with economics than comedy.”

But the remark had Democrats chuckling, too — because they think the joke’s on McCain.

Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Democratic nominee Barack Obama ’s campaign, sent out an e-mail message with a subject line containing the Associated Press headline on the story followed by “LOL! OMG!” — common e-mail message and instant messaging shorthand for “laugh out loud” and “oh, my God.”

Holtz-Eakin’s BlackBerry comments will undoubtedly echo in the electronic echo chamber at least until the election.

The rapid response from the McCain campaign that it does not support the claim could serve to limit its impact on voters. But the mini-flap comes at a bad time for McCain. He has been ridiculed of late by Obama’s campaign as out of touch, in part because he has portrayed himself as a novice with computers, and in part because he talked about the fundamental strength of the American economy on Monday as stocks were tumbling amid news that investment house Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy and other impacts of the ongoing mortgage lending crisis rippled through the financial industry.

“The fundamentals of our economy are strong, but these are very, very difficult times,” McCain said in Jacksonville, Fla. It was the first part of the sentence that Democrats seized on.

On Tuesday, Obama spokesman Bill Burton linked the two issues. “If John McCain hadn’t said that ‘the fundamentals of our economy are strong’ on the day of one of our nation’s worst financial crises, the claim that he invented the BlackBerry would have been the most preposterous thing said all week,” Burton said.

McCain spent much of Tuesday morning on television explaining his Monday assessment of the economy.