Mitt Romney’s Foreign-Policy Etiquette Still Needs Some Work

While not exactly an Olympic-sized gaffe, Mitt Romney managed to lay the groundwork for some potential issues with another major United States ally. During his speech at a Thursday fund-raiser, the Republican candidate remarked, "We are not Japan. We are not going to be a nation that suffers in decline and distress for a decade or a century."

As Foreign Policy's The Cable points out, the line could be interpreted as "needlessly insulting the face-conscious Japanese," particularly since Japan analysts (Japanalysts?) say the assertion that the country has been in decline for a century "isn't a fair characterization," considering the immense economic strides the country made following World War II. A former spokesman for the Japanese Foreign Ministry explained that, while the Japanese are somewhat used to being cited as a cautionary tale, Romney would be better off if he didn't seem to think "decade" and "century" were interchangeable.

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Gingrich & Romney's Relationship Has Definitely Warmed

"Mitt and I get along fine, we get a lot of stuff done together, and I don't particularly dislike him as a person." — Newt Gingrich responds to a question from Hardball's Chris Matthews on why candidates who've run against Romney tend to wind up hating him. Imagine how well they'd get along if John Boehner had the power to make people actually like Romney.

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Is This Factory Worker Trimming Mitt Romney’s Fingernails With His Own Teeth?

No! Clearly this is a trick of perspective! But you can imagine how awkward that would be, right? "Whoa there, you're trimming my fingernails with your teeth. Heh, that's okay, you're a hardworking American. Thanks, friend."

Also while in Chicago, Romney stopped by Harry Caray's Italian Steakhouse, where he posed next a bust of the legendary Cubs announcer.

Romney promised that, as president, he would display the bust inside the Oval Office along with the countless other busts Obama has disgracefully exiled from the White House.

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Class War and Romney’s Welfare Counterattack

Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that states could submit new proposals to move welfare recipients to work, noting that it “will only consider approving waivers relating to the work participation requirements that make changes intended to lead to more effective means of meeting the work goals of TANF.” A pair of Republican governors applied for the waivers. This week, Mitt Romney’s comically mendacious campaign has turned this into a massive plan by Barack Obama to bring back welfare:

The political gist of this attack, like the “you didn’t build that” campaign, is to manufacture — out of thin air, if necessary — a way of turning the class debate around.

Obama has been attacking Romney as an advocate of top-down economics who would revisit the failed Bush-era ideology of regressive tax cuts and lax regulation that led to enormous income gains to the rich but income stagnation to the middle class. One startling thing about the campaign is how little Romney has done to prepare himself for such an obvious line of attack. George W. Bush crafted his entire campaign around preemptively defanging the accusation of succoring the rich. He cast himself as a brush-clearin’, pickup-drivin’ son of toil, and relentlessly insisted his tax plan was primarily aimed at poor waitresses and other low-income people.

Romney has taken no steps at all to put a middle-class sheen on his background, and he's allowed Democrats to define him by his wealth and heartlessness. He seems to have fallen into the trap of believing that the sentiments about wealth that prevail among movement conservatives reflect the beliefs of Americans as a whole. Romney did try to protect himself from charges of delivering the rich a large tax cut. He left his tax plan vague, promising a rate cut (to please conservatives) but also to close enough loopholes to avoid giving the rich a net tax cut. But this turned out to be mathematically impossible, which left him in the dangerous position of having, by mathematical necessity, proposed a middle-class tax hike to accompany a tax cut on the rich.

In place of his lackluster defensive exertions, Romney is instead mounting a hyper-belligerent offensive. If Obama attacks him for redistributing from the middle class to the rich, Romney will paint Obama as redistributing from the middle class to the poor. That is the subtext of Romney’s “you didn’t build that” attack, and the even more explicit subtext of his welfare attack. Obama, in Romney’s telling, is denying the value of hard work, telling middle-class Americans they don’t deserve what they have, and then taking their money and giving it to poor people who refuse to work.

(To preemptively address the sure-to-ensue complaints, I am not calling Romney racist. He is espousing a set of ideas that one can subscribe to without any conscious or even subconscious racial animus. It is, however, empirically hard to deny that the political punch of this messaging derives from the fact that white middle-class Americans understand messages about redistribution from the hard-working middle-class to the lazy underclass in highly racialized terms. Programs like Social Security, Medicare, farm subsidies, and the like, which middle-class Americans see as benefiting deserving folks like themselves, are popular; transfer programs only become unpopular if voters see them as accruing to the undeserving poor.)

So, Romney’s attack here does have some real political punch (which is why Obama was so obviously sweating the “you didn’t build that” attack). Yet, this still leaves the question of whether Romney’s class offensive is enough. Public opinion on Obama has hardened, while opinion on Romney remains malleable and seems to be souring. Romney still has given no sign that he has a meaningful plan to prevent himself from being defined (accurately, I’d say) as a plutocrat running on retro-Bushian policies.

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Rafalca Did, Indeed, Delay Mitt Romney’s VP Pick

At least according to Bill Kristol. 

Sorry, I could not read the content fromt this page.

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Scenes From Mitt Romney’s World Insult Tour

Start Slideshow US Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney places a hand-written prayer on the Western Wall on July 29, 2012 in Jerusalem's old city, Israel. Mitt Romney visits Israel as part of a three-nation foreign tour which also includes visits to Poland and Great Britain.

Over the past week, Mitt Romney journeyed to Great Britain, Israel, and Poland, courting controversy basically everywhere along the way. But what was he doing when not picking fights with the British or the Palestinians or the traveling press pool? A bunch of other things! Here are some of those things.

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Romney’s Historical Misunderstanding, Continued

David Frum has reviewed three — count ‘em, three — books about the economic development of Italy. Frum oddly does not connect the analysis in the reviews with Mitt Romney’s Guns, Jews, and Steel argument about why rich countries are rich and poor countries are poor. (Perhaps it’s a precaution to avoid being seen as a link whore, always a danger when you’re chasing after the cheap clicks that invariably follow discussions of early-twentieth-century Italian economics.) Having no such compunction myself, I will steal his hard work to point out that the books — at least according to Frum’s review; I’m not going to read three histories of Italy just for a couple lousy blog posts — shed a lot of light on the questions that Romney stumbled into in Jerusalem.

Romney argued that culture explains why countries grow prosperous, or don’t, an explanation he not only stretches beyond all plausibility but also ignores the deeper question of what creates that culture in the first place. (Romney cited “the hand of providence.” Hmm.) Italy offers a more interesting case study. Within Italy, there is an enormous economic and cultural divide between the relatively prosperous north and the more impoverished south, the latter of whom are known as “terroni,” a kind of slang signifying lazy, poor and dirty.

But why? Southern Italy has two of the linked traits that tend to be founded in poorer countries. It’s hot and vulnerable to diseases like malaria, which exerted a massive toll not only on quality of life but on work patterns, settlement patterns, and the relationship between labor and reward. Also, and relatedly, hotter climates tend to encourage the growth of slave labor, and indeed, summarizes Frum, “The South was poor because it had always been poor, dating back probably to when the Romans imposed their system of huge grain estates worked by slave labor.”

As it happens, David Landes — the historian Romney cites as his intellectual inspiration — cites both the disease-circulating effects of heat and its tendency to spawn exploitative labor patterns as causes of Third World poverty. In his Jerusalem remarks, Romney dismissed the notion that “the physical characteristics of the land account for the differences in the success of the people that live there.” But even according to the author Romney cites, the cultural characteristics he sees as totally determinative are themselves the historical residue of the physical characteristics of the land.

Romney is obsessed with a theory of world history he does not appear to grasp. And this seems to confirm a general pattern of Romney picking out very good books and completely misunderstanding them.

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The Press Will Now Be Allowed at Mitt Romney’s Jerusalem Fund-raiser

After irking the media by barring it from tomorrow's mega-donor shindig in Jerusalem, the Romney campaign has announced that one pool reporter will be permitted to attend the event, after all. No word yet on how reclusive Republican sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson will take the news, but with all that money we're sure he can afford a pretty convincing disguise.

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Romney's Unsure If He's Paid Less Than 13.9% Tax Rate, Positive He Hasn't Overpaid

Confirmed: Romney isn't giving the government 95 percent of his income.

Mitt Romney didn't spend the entire day addressing his adviser's suggestion that he would support Israel launching a preemptive strike against Iran. He also had to deal with more questions about his taxes. In an interview with ABC News’ David Muir, Romney was unable to say whether he'd ever paid less than his 2010 rate of 13.9 percent, which is a lower rate than many middle-class Americans pay. However, he assured voters that he hasn't been overpaying his taxes (which we're not sure anyone was worried about). "I don't pay more than are legally due and frankly if I had paid more than are legally due I don't think I'd be qualified to become president," he said. "I'd think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires."

Romney said that like most Americans, he doesn't know the exact percentage of his income that went to taxes each year (though one might figure this out once it becomes a major campaign issue). "I'm happy to go back and look but my view is I've paid all the taxes required by law," said Romney. "From time to time I've been audited as happens I think to other citizens as well and the accounting firm which prepares my taxes has done a very thorough and complete job pay taxes as legally due."

Muir jumped on Romney's offer to look up the figures, asking if he'd be willing to do so for ABC News (and perhaps fax over some of those returns while he has them out). Romney reiterated that he hasn't looked at the rate he paid each year and added, "I know that I pay a very substantial amount of taxes and every year since the beginning of my career so far as I can recall." So we'll take that as a "no" on releasing more information from his returns.

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Press Barred From Mitt Romney’s Jerusalem Fund-raiser

Romney and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

While pool reporters are usually allowed at finance events, Mitt Romney's Monday morning donor breakfast at Israel's King David Hotel will not include any members of the media, the campaign has announced. A spokesman declined to explain the reasoning behind what David Axelrod punnily called the Mittness Protection Program, but observers have some ideas about what's going on. 

Romney has promised not to criticize the president on foreign soil, but whatever he says to the fund-raiser's attendees — most of whom will be American Jews, including billionaire supporter Sheldon Adelson — will almost definitely feature some allusions to (if not full-on attacks on) Obama's Israel policy. And, of course, Israel is always a "sensitive issue" among voters, and if there's anything Romney has done in the last few days, it's prove that he can turn even the tamest of subjects into a point of controversy. 

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Mitt Romney’s Campaign Is Doing Its Best to Distract People from His British Gaffe Jaunt

Romney in London.

In the wake of Mitt Romney's troubled visit to London — where he managed to dis the Olympics and draw the public ire of Prime Minister David Cameron, Mayor Boris Johnson, and most of the British citizenry while blabbing about secret meetings and weirdly undermining his wife and her fancy horse — campaign aide (and work wife) Beth Myers tweeted what looks like the candidate's VP shortlist. When asked about the post (which included @BobbyJindal, @marcorubio, and @robportman), she gave a response both social-media-savvy and regular-media-baiting: "It's a Friday follow." Intriguing, right?

The campaign also announced its readiness for a "Saturday Obama Surprise." What does that mean, you ask? Well, it's a surprise — duh! — but Romney's people would like for everyone to know that they're prepared:

It's well into the afternoon and we haven't noticed any surprises, but we'll go ahead and keep watching because that's our job. The sneaky Obama campaign, for its part, insists that they haven't got anything up their sleeve for today — a spokesman called the suggestion "dog-wagging that would make David Mamet blush."

Meanwhile, observers are still discussing Romney's flubbing of what should have been an easy opportunity to make nice to the outside world. Though he was quick to say that the London gaffe was ultimately "not a big deal," none other than Karl Rove could not help but express his amazement at the candidate's ability to offend our closest ally. "You have to shake your head," he told Fox News Friday. He went to say that while Romney could have stuck to "talking about what a wonderful experience" he had heading the Salt Lake City Olympics, he "instead he got stuck making a, somehow or another that the comments the Brits took as insult, and walked it back pretty quickly and walked it back adroitly but nonetheless the damage was done."

And now it's on to Jerusalem, where Romney's pro-Israel stance and longtime friendship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should make for a warm reception. Of course, we now know that nothing is foolproof.

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