Moved from General Questions to Elections.
samclem, Moderator
Hey! I live in that “podunk” town. I’ve never heard of a large suburban community outside a city called “podunk” before.
How do you feel about the Anglo-Saxon comments of his campaign? Those cannot be excused by fatigue and nerves.
I think the comments in the book about how England makes stuff that nobody wants is worse than his current hoof-in-mouth problem.
Yeah but in an election year he needs to woo other votes. He already has that locked sewn up.
Hopefully those still on the fence will not be as crass as most conservatives.
Fair 'nuff, I retract the podunk crack.
“now he’s insulted an entire nation instead of a local bakery”
Not to mention making the elementary mistake of using “England” as synonymous with the United Kingdom.
After Reagan, Bush The Elder and Bush The Clown and Palin we really don’t have very high expectations of Republican Presidential types. But when you manage to piss off extreme right-wing mouthpieces like the Daily Mail you know you’ve failed on an epic scale.
He managed to change the subject from his tax returns.
It’s a big deal because Romney’s whole angle on foreign policy is that Obama has diminished the United States’ stature in the world and he’s the guy to right that ship. Going out and making gaffe after gaffe after gaffe on his very first day overseas unravels that entire attack.
So Romney goes from talking about how important we’re viewed in the world, to suddenly having one of his top surrogates at home saying this:
So if the focus should continue to be on what’s happening here at home, why is Romney spending a week abroad?
“Look-Over there! An imaginary distraction!”
Hopefully we’ll never find out. I’m looking forward to this cockroach running for cover the minute the votes are tallied.
There is a difference. Just like how someone can complain about how awful his mom is, but he’ll get in a fight with you if you say something negative about her. Also, he’s not visiting as an adviser, he’s a guest. On it’s own, it’s not a terrible statement in my opinion, but adding up with everything else, it creates a bad pattern.
Each statement on it’s own is minor, but to have several in one day is a bad pattern. Also, this should have been the easiest trip ever for him. He was going to a country that is one of our closest allies and very similar in a lot of ways. He didn’t have to learn any bits of foreign languages or customs that terribly different from American ones. It should have been easy for him to study on the plane what to do and say and his misstatements make it seem like he didn’t even do that easy homework.
Also, a president will have to do some diplomatic trips and meet with foreign leaders and negotiate and work out agreements and treaties. The treaties and negotiations are the difficult parts, the meet and greets should be the easy parts. If he blunders the meet and greets and accidentally insults the host country now when he doesn’t even have the pressure of having to reach any agreements, it doesn’t inspire confidence that he’ll be able to work out treaties in the future.
I’m not sure if he’s better or worse than how The New Yorker caricatured him in January:
According to Bobby Jindal and Bob McDonnell they’re no big deal because Americans don’t care about the foreign press. So Mitt has nothing to worry about and can gaffe his way through on his grand tour.
Depending on how one defines “diplomatic incident”, I guess you could say Romney was guilty of creating one. For me though, it would rank right up there with the Queen of England eating a hot dog with a knife and fork while here in America. I mean, c’mon, he’s not even an official representative of the US. Now, our British friends may see things differently and they have every right to, but to give this more than a passing glance is, it seems to me, ridiculous.
Seeing Cameron and Romney standing together at the photo-op, it did have the appearance of someone (Romney) being humored.
This, I think, should be the take-away message. Conservatives have been falling all over themselves in their attempts to make Obama look “unpresidential” overseas (the iPod gift, etc.)… and then their fair-haired boy makes what is *undeniably *a gaffe, one which actually offended the Brits.
I think the gaffe itself wasn’t really that big a deal. However, the fact that he completely blew his chance to make a good impression on his first campaign trip is a *huge *deal.
yep, I think the point is he presented an easy target for his opponents when he really didn’t need to, and when he was trying to achieve exactly the opposite. It wasn’t exactly a difficlut question to field.
He’s obv. not as plain stupd at GWB but this really defines his very narrow comfort zone.
Exactly to which phony gaffe are you referring?