by ELIOT WEINBERGER
The one interesting thing about Mitt Romney is his nearly pathological absence of political savvy. Has there ever been a national candidate who has managed to alienate or outright insult so many potential voters? The tiny pebbles of cruel or clueless Mittisms – mocking the cookies some elderly women supporters baked for him and the cheap rain ponchos of Nascar fans; the delight in firing incompetent domestic workers; the entreaty that ‘corporations are people too’; the casual ‘I’ll bet you $10,000’ made to the dense Rick Perry in the Republican debates or the offhand reference to Ann Romney’s ‘couple of Cadillacs’; the assertion that the typical middle-class family makes $250,000 a year (median income per household is $50,000) – have, in the last few weeks, turned into an avalanche that has not only buried his campaign, but quite possibly the prospects of other Republicans in tight races around the country. Right-wing pundits and would-be congressmen are now trampling dogs and small children as they scramble to get off the sinking presidential yacht.
It was bad enough that, at the Republican convention, Mitt’s exceedingly long acceptance speech failed to praise veterans, fallen soldiers, and the troops overseas – rhetorical tropes as essential to these occasions as the evocation of God’s eternal blessings on the US of A. But then, in a subsequent interview, Mitt tried to explain the omission: ‘When you give a speech you don’t go through a laundry list, you talk about the things that you think are important.’ Needless to say, the grunts in Kandahar, the permanently maimed, and the military widows, widowers and orphans did not appreciate being compared to pressed button-down shirts.
On 11 September, as the news of the riots in Libya and Egypt was just coming in, Mitt’s statement – ‘It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathise with those who waged the attacks’ – delivered with a creepy smirk that quickly went viral, violated two cardinal rules of American campaign etiquette. A challenger never criticises the president in the middle of a sudden crisis – it is presumed that the nation rallies together. And, even more important, there is no overt politicking on 9/11, the holiest of Holy Days, a day for strictly non-partisan pieties. That Mitt acted rashly – and got most of the facts wrong – flunked the ‘potential presidential crisis management’ test (a.k.a. the ‘3 a.m. phone call’) and was a further demonstration of his diplomatic skills, not many weeks after insulting the British for their organisation of the Olympics, insulting the Palestinians by characterising their culture as inferior to that of the Israelis, while simultaneously insulting the Israelis by praising them for the inherent Jewish talent for making money.
And now there is the famous, endlessly looping video of Mitt talking to some bored-looking zillionaires at a $50,000-a-plate dinner in the Boca Raton (‘Mouse Mouth’) home of one Marc Leder – a hedge funder previously known only to readers of tabloids for the parties he hosts at the $500,000-a-month mansion he rents in the Hamptons, one of which, it is said, featured bikinied Russian women on raised platforms and men twirling flaming torches, while guests milled around naked and openly had sex by the pool.
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