If a politician makes a gaffe but no one hears it, does it make a sound?

“I come from the ‘60s, a long time ago,” Hillary Clinton said at Saturday’s Democratic presidential debate, in response to a question about student activism.

Supposedly this comment — an appalling admission that she had the gall to be alive 50 years ago — was among the biggest missteps of her campaign. Republican strategists went wild, suggesting that this daffiest of statements was the beginning of the end for Clinton. Some envisioned the clip starring in hard-hitting anti-Hillary general-election propaganda, shown alongside lava lamps or other ‘60s accouterments.

“Clip: ‘I come from the 60s, a long time ago.’ Save. Smile,” tweeted Republican strategist Rory Cooper.

“Nobody, Republican or Democrat, wants to vote for a candidate from the 1960s when we’re well into the 21st century,” said conservative pollster Frank Luntz, who was born in the 1960s.

Marco Rubio’s campaign released an entire ad hanging on the remark.

I confess I don’t understand what’s all that damning about a politician accurately naming the decade in which she went to college.

Certainly other candidates in the race have made far more questionable claims about their resumes and records, conjuring up magical belt buckles and the occasional instance of time travel. (Rubio called himself the “son of exiles,” but his family emigrated from Cuba more than 2½ years before Fidel Castro took power.) At least Clinton wasn’t fabricating sniper gunfire, as she had in her tall tale from the 2008 campaign cycle. By comparison, her completely accurate recounting of when she was enrolled in college hardly seems like a liability.

Rubio’s campaign framed Clinton’s ‘60s comment as fodder for generational warfare, positioning the Florida senator as the candidate of the future and Clinton, apparently by her own admission, as the candidate of the past.

But even then I’m not sure why invoking the past would in and of itself imply much vulnerability.

Just consider how much conservative rhetoric relies on nostalgia for bygone eras, when men were men and America Was Still Great. A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute suggests that such nostalgia-based rhetoric is a winning strategy, given that six in 10 Republicans say the United States’ “best days” are behind us.

No wonder, then, that every Republican presidential debate has featured candidates, including Rubio, clambering over one another to prove that they and they alone are the legitimate second coming of Ronald Reagan, who arguably held office “a long time ago.” Many of the supposedly fresh policy ideas that Rubio and his ilk offer, such as trickle-down economics, are likewise very obviously plucked from the past.

Perhaps the real problem with Clinton’s comments is the era of the past that she invoked: the turbulent ‘60s.

From an economic perspective, there’s plenty in that decade to be nostalgic about; it represented one of the longest stretches of growth in our nation’s history. But socially and culturally, the era of course signifies something different, especially to conservatives. Perhaps Republicans think this comment can be used as shorthand to contextualize Clinton as a far-left hippie socialist type, similar to how Bernie Sanders is sometimes caricatured. A Photoshopped image of a long-tressed Hillary in colorful hippie gear quickly made its way around the Internet.

But a dirty-hippie, make-love-not-war rendering of Clinton seems unlikely to stick, given that she’s relatively hawkish and, if anything, has usually been caricatured more as a stiff, overly cautious, pantsuited panderer than a radical, impulsive, rumpled ideologue.

I suspect also that the younger voters Rubio hopes to attract by drawing attention to this supposed generational gap may not be terribly put off by Clinton’s ‘60s throwback. Many politically active millennials romanticize the ‘60s as a sort of golden era, when youth culture and young people’s policy priorities had greater influence over the country’s political discourse.

And to middle-aged and older voters — you know, people who “come from the ‘60s” — denunciations of Clinton’s supposed gaffe may merely smack of ageism.

None of this is to say that Clinton gave a perfect debate performance; her linkage between Wall Street donations and 9/11 was a far greater misstep, if a less sound-bite-friendly one. But the outsize celebrations that followed that ‘60s comment, like the 11-hour congressional grilling a few weeks ago, reveal just how desperate her opponents have become to tarnish a candidate who, not long ago, was considered so easy to defeat.