Romney Fumbles

~ Laura

Like everyone else, I have been chuckling endlessly about Romney gaffes in London. He criticized the London Olympic committee for screwing up the security. He said "the nation of Great Britain." Andrew Sullivan has a recap of the reactions. 

Romney, for a moment, forgot that he was on a campaign trail. He flashed back to his proudest moment as the head of the Olympic committee for the Salt Lake games. As he strolled through the city with his wife, he was most certainly thinking that he could do better. Instead of doing what politicians on a campaign trail are supposed to do – kiss babies, make yummy sounds over terrible food, say bland forgettable statements – he said what he was actually thinking. 

His overbearing Master of the Universe personality is just below the surface, and it's just fun when it sneaks out for us to see. 

Published by Laura

17 thoughts on “Romney Fumbles”

  1. Meanwhile, Obama and his administration have over the past few years:
    1) returned a British loan of a bust (admittedly very ugly) of Churchill
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/4623148/Barack-Obama-sends-bust-of-Winston-Churchill-on-its-way-back-to-Britain.html
    2. given the queen an iPod (she probably already had one)
    http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyharnden/9355453/Barack_Obamas_gift_for_the_Queen_an_iPod_your_Majesty/
    3. gave a visually-impaired British Prime Minister a bulk pack of American classic movies (you know, a typical Costco type item) that wouldn’t play on British DVD players
    http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090319/1337464182.shtml
    4. falsely claimed in a memoir that the British colonial powers in Kenya imprisoned and tortured his father
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9339640/Tale-of-British-brutality-toward-Barack-Obamas-grandfather-probably-untrue-book-claims.html
    5. taken credit for the achievements of British intelligence while leaking their sensitive information
    (I can give cites for that if anybody wants them)

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  5. make yummy sounds over terrible food
    When Romney was in this area, he was given some cookies from a popular local bakery and suggested they came from the 7-11. That was kind of great. (I’m not fond of local cookie preferences. The local taste tends toward very dry cookies.)

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  7. What did Obama “falsely claim”?!
    According to the link: while “incidents of that sort certainly happened”, it “seems unlikely” that Mr. Obama’s grandfather was one such victim.
    Ah, so “seems unlikely” equals “falsely claimed.” Sounds like the kind of honest accounting they do at Bain Capital.

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  10. Oops! Well, I think it says a lot for lack of intent if the White House people don’t even know which bust they’re talking about.

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  11. “Oops. Lack of intent”.
    Now there’s a slogan to win over all
    those independents; I feel better already.

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  12. Maureen Dowd had a funny Romney column on the gaffes. This line made me laugh out loud
    “After going all the way to London to see the Olympics, he decides he won’t watch his wife’s mare, Rafalca, compete in horse ballet? He tries to win the political horse race by going to the Games, which are literally a race in which he has a horse, and then feigns disengagement? ”
    I can actually respect someone for seeing a problem and thinking of solutions (especially when they have expertise). And Romney can claim expertise in putting together an Olympics. The social gaffe Romney made was to offer the generic “I could have done it better”, and, at time when even good advice wouldn’t have been of value. It’s masters of the universe behavior when you think your special expertise in something (like running the Olympics or having been an early investor in Amazon) means you have solutions to everyone’s problems.

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  14. Way too cute
    How about this:
    “I swear—by my links and my love of them—that I will never make links for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to link to mine.”

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  15. Ha. Sorry for the cuteness. It’s an old phrase here that originated back when most of the links were to other bloggers, not MSM. In the old blog world, bloggers were supposed to send readers to other bloggers to help build up others.

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  17. So, I’ve been thinking about Herbert Hoover recently since I saw a documentary on him.
    I had not realized that he was considered such an international hero before he became President. When there was a famine in Belgium during World War I, Hoover organized private donations (no government funding) to prevent mass starvation. After the war, he did the same thing when there was a famine in the Soviet Union. As a doctrinaire Republican, he was a strong believer in private enterprise, and an opponent of government interference, and applied those principals in ways that probably saved millions of lives.
    When he became Secretary of Commerce and there were huge floods in Mississippi, the South asked him to be in charge of the recovery, even though it wasn’t in his job description, because he was the disaster relief specialist. From Wikipedia:
    The great victory of his relief work, he stressed, was not that the government rushed in and provided all assistance; it was that much of the assistance available was provided by private citizens and organizations in response to his appeals. “I suppose I could have called in the Army to help,” he said, “but why should I, when I only had to call upon Main Street.”
    So, then, Hoover becomes President because everyone loves him, and then the stock market crashes, and he doesn’t mobilize the government to deal with it immediately, because he’s all about the private citizens handling things themselves. Unfortunately, the private citizens didn’t have Hoover around the mobilize them like they did in Belgium and Russia and Mississippi, and the depression just kept getting worse. And now “Hoover” has become synonymous with “bad President.”
    There’s an analogy to Romney in there somewhere, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

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