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“Mitt’s Olympic Meddle”: Romney Just Can’t Run Away From Fate

So the Republican presidential contender, eager to show off more than gubernatorial experience, travels overseas to bolster his foreign policy credentials. Then, in a TV interview, he blurts out a shockingly ill-considered, if undeniably true, observation that snowballs until the poor guy collapses into an international punch line.

It was a vertiginous fall for George Romney, who, while running for president in 1967, asserted that generals and diplomats had given him “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get” when he toured Vietnam two years earlier.

And it was painful for Mitt, who had to watch his father’s epic gaffe from afar, while he was over in France struggling to drum up a few Mormon converts.

In their book “The Real Romney,” Michael Kranish and Scott Helman quoted Mitt’s sister Jane as saying the episode deeply affected Mitt: “He’s not going to put himself out on a limb. He’s more cautious, more scripted.”

That’s when Mitt began to build his own sterile biosphere, shaping his temperament and political career to make sure he never stumbled into such a costly moment of candor.

Even though the Mormon doesn’t drink coffee, he has measured out his life in coffee spoons, limiting access to reporters, giving interviews mostly to Fox News, hiding personal data, resisting putting out concrete policy proposals, refusing to release tax returns, trimming his conscience to match the moment, avoiding spontaneity. But somehow he ended up making the same unforced error that his dad did.

It’s like the epigraph in John O’Hara’s “Appointment at Samarra.” You can run from fate, but fate will be waiting in the next town, at the next marketplace.

Even as he angled to appear Anglo-Saxon and obsequiously vowed to restore the bust of Churchill to the Oval Office, Mitt condescended to the nation that invented condescension. The Brits swiftly boxed his ears for his insolence and foul calumny.

Conservatives in London oozed scorn. Mayor Boris Johnson mocked “a guy called Mitt Romney,” and Prime Minister David Cameron suggested it was easier to run an Olympics “in the middle of nowhere.” Fleet Street spanked “Nowhere Man” and “Mitt the Twit.”

Conservatives on Fox News were dumbfounded. “You have to shake your head,” Karl Rove said. Charles Krauthammer pronounced the faux pas “unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible. I’m out of adjectives.”

The alarming thing about Romney is that he has been running for president for years, but he still doesn’t know how to read a room. He doesn’t take anything in, he just puts it out. He doesn’t hear himself the way the rest of us hear him.

In the Mitt-sphere, populated by his shiny white family, the Mormon Church and a narrow, homogenous inner circle, Romney’s image of himself as wise, caring, smart and capable is relentlessly reinforced. That leaves him constantly surprised that other people don’t love what he is saying.

We may wince when the blithering toff, or want-wit, as Shakespeare would say, arrives at the Brits’ home and throws his Cherry Coke Zero can in the prize rose bushes. But what drives his gaffes is his desire to preen over accomplishments.

As a candidate, he’s expected to stoop to conquer, to play a man of the people. But he really wants voters to know that he earned $250 million, and not even in the same business where his dad made a name for himself.

So he keeps blurting out hoity-toity stuff to make sure we know he’s not hoi polloi — about his friends who are Nascar owners, his wife’s Cadillacs, how he likes to fire people and how he, too, is unemployed. And he builds a car elevator in the middle of an economic slough.

In his interview with Brian Williams in London, Romney couldn’t resist giving himself the laurels for saving the Salt Lake City Games by analyzing whether the British ones were off by a hair, or a hire.

Then he tried to scamper back to the obligatory common-man script and ended up looking clumsy and the one thing he most certainly is not: unuxorious.

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?

“This is Ann’s sport,” Romney told Williams dismissively. “I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it. I will not be watching the event.”

He came across like a wazzock, as The Daily Telegraph called him, using a British insult for a daft know-it-all.

Romney programmed himself into a robot, so he wouldn’t boil over with opinions and convictions, like his more genuine dad.

But if we’re going to have someone who’s removed, always struggling to connect and emote, why not stick with the president we already have?

Better the android you know than the android you don’t know.

 

By: Maureen Dowd, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, July 28, 2012

July 30, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Speaking In Secret Code”: Romney’s Love Letter To The Israeli Right Wing

Usually Mitt Romney’s problem, as we saw in London, is that he says something obnoxious. But on Friday, to the right-wing Israeli newspaper Israel Hayom, owned by Las Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson, he said something that simply made no sense, about George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and the Arab Spring. Check that: it made no sense unless you keep up with the tergiversations and vanishing-commissar new versions of history propounded by the neocons and duly followed by Romney. Once again, Herr Mittens proves that there are times when he emphatically does not misspeak—when he’s sucking up to the right.

Israel Hayom asked Romney: “How do you view the Arab Spring and the way in which the U.S. responded to the uprisings in those Arab states?” Romney’s reply has to be reprinted in full to be savored properly: “Clearly we’re disappointed in seeing Tunisia and Morocco elect Islamist governments. We’re very concerned in seeing the new leader in Egypt as an Islamist leader. It is our hope to move these nations toward a more modern view of the world and to not present a threat to their neighbors and to the other nations of the world.

“The Arab Spring is not appropriately named. It has become a development of more concern and it occurred in part because of the reluctance on the part of various dictators to provide more freedom to their citizens. President [George W.] Bush urged [deposed Egyptian President] Hosni Mubarak to move toward a more democratic posture, but President Obama abandoned the freedom agenda and we are seeing today a whirlwind of tumult in the Middle East in part because these nations did not embrace the reforms that could have changed the course of their history, in a more peaceful manner.”

What does this even mean? If this reads to you like some kind of sign language or secret code, you aren’t far off the mark. Romney is speaking a kind of code. As Daniel Larison points out in The American Conservative, what Romney is trying to do is finesse his way around the two phases of the Arab Spring.

There was a time, see, when the Arab Spring was a good thing to the neocons. That it was happening at all was solely a reflection of Bush’s courageous “freedom agenda” and had nothing to do with anything done by Obama, even though it was all happening on Obama’s watch. That was in the early phase, the hopeful, Tahrir Square-centered, throwing-off-the-yoke-of-oppression phase.

But then the Arab Spring mutated into phase two, the democracy phase, when people started voting and, damn them, started voting fundamentalists into office. Suddenly, the Arab Spring wasn’t a glorious manifestation of the freedom agenda. Now it was a dark turn toward a pan-Muslim hegemony that was to be pinned, naturally, on the Muslim in chief in the White House.

So that explains part of Romney’s answer. The other part requires a leap of faith across some vast Grand Canyon of statecraft. So let’s get this straight: if Obama had continued Bush’s agenda, Romney’s saying, then Mubarak would have felt pressured to give more freedom to his citizens—so we’d have a freer Egypt, but with Mubarak still in charge. Um…sure. Just like he did when Bush was pressuring him, and he did almost nothing, a few fig-leaf local elections that meant little.

In its way, it’s kind of elegant. Romney manages to speak highly and sorrowfully of the freedom agenda, and thus to praise Bush. He disparages Obama. And—and here’s the real key to this puzzle—he signals to right-wing readers of this interview in Israel that we’d all be better off if the whole thing had never happened and Mubarak were still in power, closing off those tunnels in Gaza, never mind how full his jails were of his own people. That was his narrow intent—to speak to a conservative Israeli readership, and, who knows, perhaps Adelson himself.

More broadly, Romney’s remarks betray an odd attitude toward history. First of all, it is worth remembering that Bush’s freedom agenda involved, you know, a war in which tens of thousands of people were killed and tens of thousands more turned into refugees. But second, would Romney really rather the Arab Spring never happened? Yes, we’ll go through a period in which fundamentalist parties will prevail, but those parties will have to improve the lot of the citizens or they will, we hope, be held accountable. It’s a regrettable but inevitable phase of the process, and the region has to pass through it, no matter who the American president is and what kind of speeches about freedom he gives.

In other words, democracy for Arab people is OK, maybe, provided American liberals and Democrats don’t get any credit for helping the cause along, and most of all provided the democratization process causes the Israeli right wing no discomfort. Both conditions, especially the second, render the whole project a nullity.

It certainly and quite directly raises the question of how a President Romney would have positioned the United States during the Tahrir Square uprising. With the batphone to his great pal Bibi beeping and blinking nonstop, would Romney in essence have backed Mubarak? Would he have placed the United States against those striving people in the street because however many months later, they were likely to vote the wrong way?

Romney may not know what he’s saying when the topic is Britons’ collective will or “varmint” hunting or the quality of cookies served by working-class Pennsylvanians. But he knew exactly what he was saying in that interview, and the results are sadder to contemplate than his famous errors.

 

By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 28, 2012

July 30, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“It’s Not About The Gaffes”: It’s What Mitt Romney Says When He’s Thinking

Mitt Romney’s slips of the tongue aren’t the problem: It’s what he says when he’s thinking.

Mitt Romney is getting a lot of grief for the not-so-auspicious beginning to his first overseas trip as leader of the Republican party. In case you’ve been trapped in a well for the last two days, when he was asked by Brian Williams how, in his expert opinion, he thought London was doing in preparing for the start of the Olympics, instead of offering the expected polite banality (“I’m sure it’s going to be terrific”), Romney said something a bit more honest, saying that there were “a few things that were disconcerting” about the preparations. The Brits were not amused, and he got very public pushback from both Prime Minister David Cameron and London mayor Boris Johnson. It’s all well and good to enjoy Romney’s misfortune on this score. But let’s not forget: The real problem with Romney isn’t what he blurts out by accident, it’s what he says when he has plenty of time to consider his words.

As I’ve written a zillion times, running for president is very difficult, and one of the hardest things is having every word that comes out of your mouth recorded, analyzed, and often twisted around and taken out of context. No one, and I mean no one, can go through that process without saying something that gets them in trouble on a fairly regular basis. Even the most talented politicians had their share of “gaffes.” Barack Obama has. Bill Clinton did. Ronald Reagan did. No matter how good you are, it’ll happen. And if you’re not very good (and even Mitt Romney’s admirers won’t say he’s a natural politician) it’s going to happen even more.

Many of Romney’s gaffes can be pretty easily forgiven. When he said “Corporations are people, my friend,” for instance, he was trying to say that corporate profits eventually find their way to humans. In the case of the Olympic gaffe, other than being undiplomatic, there wasn’t anything inherently horrible about what he said. But if you look broadly at Romney’s rhetoric, what you see is not only that he tells extemporaneous lies quite frequently, but more important, he repeats lies long after it has become clear that they are in fact wrong.

There are plenty of examples; one of my favorites is how for years, Romney has been saying that Barack Obama “went around the world apologizing for America,” a claim that is just false. And the latest example is how Romney has dishonestly ripped from context an Obama quote about how businesses benefit from the collective effort of other citizens and from government. It would be one thing if Romney used his distortion of Obama’s words to needle him in a couple of speeches. But Romney has practically decided to base his entire campaign on it, from making ads about it to printing signs about it, to organizing events around it. And I promise you, neither Mitt Romney nor any sane person who works for him actually believes that what Obama meant to say was that people who own businesses didn’t actually build their businesses. They know what he said and they know what he meant, but they decided that they don’t really give a crap.

And this tendency, far more than all of Romney’s “gaffes,” is what really gives us insight into who he is. Perhaps as president Romney would only lie about unimportant things, and to no greater degree than the average president. But his performance so far suggests otherwise.

 

By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 27, 2012

July 29, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , | 3 Comments

“Bumpkin-In-Chief”: Romney Promises Libor-Scandal Banksters He’ll Score For Them

Of course Mitt Romney’s arrival in London was awkward. Mitt Romney’s arrival anywhere is awkward.

But don’t think that Romney’s jaunt across the pond has been a complete disaster.

Aside from some public relations missteps, he has accomplished precisely what he set out to do.

Admittedly, the missteps have been serious.

Romney’s bumpkin-in-chief beginning in London was epic: he suggested the Brits had done a poor job organizing the Olympics, violated international security protocols and struggled to keep the names of his hosts straight. Britain’s Sun, a particularly conservative tabloid, went so far as to dub him “Mitt the Twit” on a frontpage that the Brits—and plenty of American Democrats—will dub a “keeper.”

What with an aide making cryptic comments about how Romney has a better understanding than President Obama of “Anglo-Saxon heritage,” nothing about the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s step onto the global stage seemed to go right.

Except, of course, for the real purpose of the trip, which was to collect cash from the most scandal-plagued of London’s financial insiders— and to assure the embattled banksters that he would, if elected, use the power of the presidency to protect them from regulation and oversight.

That task Romney managed with the agility of the “vulture capitalist” described by his Republican primary foes.

Within the well-guarded confines of London’s posh Mandarin Oriental hotel Thursday night, Romney met with at least 250 of the top bankers, speculators and financial manipulators in the world—including representatives of Barclays, the bank that recently paid almost $500 million in fines after its officials were charged with providing false information to interest-rate regulators.

Most candidates would have shied away from bankers who were, and are, at the center of the Libor-rigging scandal. But Romney embraced them.

Barclays chief executive Bob Diamond had to withdraw as a co-chair of Romney’s London fundraiser festivities—after Diamond was forced out of his position and then dragged before a Parliamentary select committee for a round of “what did you know and when did you know it” questioning about the filing of false reports and the manipulation of global markets. Embarrassing? Not really. The no-shame-when-it-comes-to-money-grabbing Romney campaign just made another Barclays insider a co-chair, along with representatives of of Bank of Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, Goldman Sachs, Blackstone and Wells Fargo Securities—and, of course, Bain Capital Europe.

What was Romney thinking?

First and foremost, he wanted the estimated $2 million in campaign contributions that the global financiers ponied up Thursday night.

But the Republican presidential candidate came to London to offer the the scandal-plagued bankers something in return for the checks that were delivered in increments of as much as $75,000: reassurance that he really is one of them. And that a Romney presidency would serve their interests.

Referring to the signature Wall Street regulatory reform of the Obama presidency, Romney reassured the bankers that “I’d like to get rid of Dodd Frank and go back and look at regulation piece by piece.”

While he couldn’t quite get the hang of international diplomacy, Mitt Romney was entirely comfortable standing on foreign soil and promising international bankers that, as president, he would take care of them.

 

By: John Nichols, The Nation, July 27, 2012

July 29, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“Anglo Saxon Statesman”: Romney Brags About Meeting With Chief Of U.K.’s Top-Secret MI6 Intelligence Service

So Mitt Romney spends Tuesday pledging that as president he would never, ever leak intelligence information and then today:

Eyebrows going up about Romney’s claim to have met the Sir John Sawers, the chief of MI6. Asked about Syria by an American reporter whether he and Cameron spoke about Syria and he replies: “I appreciated the insights and perspectives of the leaders of the government here and the opposition here as well as the head of MI6”

As The Guardian explains:

For our American readership, this isn’t like bragging you just met David Petraeus. The British take on the national secret intelligence service comes with an extra-heavy dollop of the whole secret thing. The very existence of the MI6 was not officially acknowledged until 1994.Good luck, Romney handlers: this is only stop No. 1 on a three-stop international tour. What will he say in Jerusalem?

Maybe if MI6 also handled Romney’s tax returns then he could have kept his mouth shut?

Or perhaps he was simply distracted by trying to put out the fire caused by his other gaffe: saying that he doubted Great Britain’s ability to pull off the games.

“You know, it’s hard to know just how well it will turn out,” Romney said. “There are a few things that were disconcerting, the stories about the – private security firm not having enough people – the supposed strike of the immigration and customs officials, that obviously is not something which is encouraging.”

Prime Minister David Cameron reassured Romney that everything would turn out just fine, adding a bit of a rebuke to Romney: “We are holding an Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in the world,” Cameron said. “Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere.” Romney, who has made “No Apology” the centerpiece of his foreign policy, subsequently apologized, walking backhis comments doubting London’s readiness.

I guess the moral of the story is that Mitt Romney has all of Dick Cheney’s diplomatic talent … with none of his charm.

By: Jed Lewiston, Daily Kos, July 26, 2012

July 27, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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