Is Mitt Romney among his own ‘47%’?

When I criticised Mitt Romney for his confused message over Ben Bernanke that ended up as an inadvertent endorsement of Barack Obama (a confusion that could be said to sum up his campaign), I (and 99.9999 of the world) was unaware of the avowedly dumb-arse comments in May at a venue periodically used for libertine cavorting.  Dismissing 47% of Americans as a perennial lost cause and not worth bothering about, he followed it up with utter dimness over the Middle Eastern situation, regarding the Palestinian factions as monolithic, the West Bank having a territorial border with Syria and that Jordan, an historic ally of the West who made peace with Israel in 1994, as a fulcrum of Iranian intervention.  I once thought that though a Romney presidency would be a period of dark reaction domestically for the USA, at least I expected an administration of his to have a pragmatic foreign policy as he seemed like an intelligent man.

Yet his disastrous tour of the UK, Israel and Poland, leaving a trail of gaffes like a habitual litterbug, was after his May comments on the Middle East.  You might say he follows in an infamous tradition of Republican leaders ignorant of the world beyond the borders of the USA.  George W Bush talked of “Greece and the Grecians” and failed to name any national leaders in the Indian subcontinent when questioned in 2000.  His father announced the end of communism in 1991, when a prominent proponent of this philosophy was merely 90 miles off the coast of Florida, China was rising and the victor in the Vietnam War was still in power (plus there was Laos). This was the time of the notorious Dan Quayle ( though not the apocrypha; “I was on a tour of Latin America recently and the only regret I have is that I didn’t study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people,” he did say “We have a firm commitment to Europe.  We are a part of Europe.”).  Ronald Reagan could be questioned as if he was ever really aware of what was happening in the world, especially when he denied the Iran-Contra affair (which broke the US Constitution).   Then there was the nadir of Gerald Ford – “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and there never will be under a Ford administration.... The United States does not concede that those countries are under the domination of the Soviet Union.”  It took his advisors many days to convince him that he was wrong after this debacle in one of the election debates.

Thankfully, it seems Mitt Romney has blown the election (maybe the first in a long time when the highest spender did not win).  Be afraid, very afraid, if he does accede to The Oval Office.