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Mitt’s Olympic Meddle
by Maureen
Dowd
July
28, 2012
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. [emphasis added]
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.
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