Learn English – Single-word or idiom request to mean “overshoot the runway” and its etymology

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In yesterday's Outfront anchored by Erin Burnett, she and one of the panelists exchanged the below conversation:

Burnett: So, Van, Clinton was wrong technically in terms of there's
been no evidence of video. Okay? Wrong on that. Does she owe Donald
Trump an apology?

Van Jones, Former Special Adviser to President Obama: Well,
I don't think so. First of all, she overshot the runway trying
to make an accurate point. Lots and lots of terrorism experts have
said over and over again, when you have the kind of bombastic rhetoric
that Donald Trump has and increasingly other Republicans have, where
it seems like they're smearing all Muslims…

The topic was whether Clinton should apologize for her unsubstantiated remarks in the debate:

The country needed to make sure the really discriminatory messages
that Trump is sending around the world don’t fall on receptive ears.
He is becoming ISIS’s best recruiter. They are going out people
showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to
recruit more radical jihadists.

The noun runway means:

A strip of hard ground along which aircraft take off and land.

[Oxford Online Dictionary]

  1. I understand its meaning in the context, but what does it exactly mean? I tried to Google the idiom, but I found only one hit in Urban Dictionary whose definition doesn't seem to fit in the context (I don't want to put it here).

  2. I wonder if there are any other (better) single words or idioms that can express the same meaning in the above quote. Any suggestion?

  3. I can't find the origin of the idiom. I would like to know when and how the idiom started to mean what it means now. I can just speculate it could have started as a military term.

Best Answer

As pjc and others have noted, it's a metaphor derived directly from aviation. A more common metaphor with practically the same meaning would be "missed the target". I think the speaker was trying to mean "overcompensated" in this case, in the sense of saying something true but which the audience was not receptive to or could not digest fully (rhetorically off).

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