“It’s The Sun Wot Won It.” Rupert Murdoch’s most powerful UK tabloid turns on Romney.
Is Mitt Romney more gaffe-prone than your average politician? Just look at Thursday’s headlines: On the Times’ Caucus blog, “New Olympic Event: Cameron Vs. Romney.” The Post needles that Romney is “showing gold medal tone deafness,” while Politico supplies its usual smorgasboard of stories, from “No Gold Medal for Mitt from British Press” to “Romney’s Olympics Clean-Up Continues.” The faux pas behind all the kerfuffle? Romney, the man who supposedly saved the 2002 Games in Utah from “the shadows of scandal,” questioned Britain’s readiness as a host, calling preparations “disconcerting” and trouble with a private security firm “not something which is encouraging.” Of course, Romney quickly backpedaled, giving ironic lie to the title of his most recent book, “No Apologies,” as well as his frequent assertion that, unlike Obama’s much-ballyhooed 2008 jaunt across Europe, he would not be going on any “apology tour.”
Still, the candidate’s seeming ingratitude toward his hosts provoked a fierce, fast backlash. That the British media, from the ultra-conservative Telegraph (a.k.a. the “Torygraph”) to the liberal Guardian, jumped all over the comments is no surprise; neither, I suppose, were the reactions from Prime Minister David Cameron, who snidely defended the big-city games with a slam against Salt Lake City (“Of course it’s easier if you hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere”), and London mayor Boris Johnson, who roared at a torch-relay rally, “There’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether we’re ready.” More unusual was the size of the response in the U.S., where the misstep occupied prime real estate on the splash pages of both the Times and the Post for most of the day.
Does Romney make more blunders than previous candidates? Are his goof-ups more dramatic or ridiculous than President Obama’s? Certainly he seems to put his foot in his mouth more often than Obama, whose “gaffes” tend to come into two distinct flavors: first, legitimate policy positions ripped from their context and psychoanalyzed by Frank Luntz into expressions of anti-American sentiment (“You didn’t make that” becomes “Only government makes you great”); and second, classic “Kinsley gaffes,” in which a politician inadvertently reveals how he really feels (“It’s not surprising when they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion”), even when the truth is infelicitous or offensive. Romney, on the other hand, makes news for saying genuinely dumb things. This past week has seen not only the ill-timed Olympics critique and the acknowledgement, apparently beyond the pale in the secrecy-prizing U.K., of a meeting with the head of the MI6 intelligence agency but the contention by an anonymous adviser that the Republican’s “Anglo-Saxon heritage” allows him to more “fully appreciate the shared history” between Britain and the United States than Obama. From “I have some great friends who are NASCAR team owners” to “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” Romney spent the primary campaign out-oopsing even Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich.
Even if Romney GBI (Gaffes Batted In) is sky-high, however, does this justify the media’s rabid dissection of every unfortunate comment? Undoubtedly, his campaign staff would answer in the negative, and heap aspersions on the “liberal media bias” evident in such overblown coverage. Every time a mainstream outlet so much as breathes a negative word about her boss, press secretary Andrea Saul springs into action, pumping out a barrage of e-mails accusing this newspaper or that cable program of left-wing slant and anti-Mormon bias. But I suspect the media would put any candidate under a similar microscope; it certainly doesn’t shy away from deconstructing Obama’s every statement, despite what conservatives would have us believe about a “lapdog” press and an “unvetted” president. At the heart of the fine-tooth-comb phenomenon may be simple supply and demand. The 24-hour news cycle is a harsh mistress, and — to add another metaphor to the pile — the beast of the empty page or silent broadcast studio must be fed. Many of Romney’s out-of-touch remarks are easy targets because they play into suspicions that he lives in an insulated rich man’s universe and conveniently reinforce the of a clueless rich guy who has to remove the silver spoon from his mouth before inserting his foot. It’s lazy journalism, perhaps, to let offhand remarks about Ann Romney owning “a couple of Cadillacs” become shorthand for the candidate’s notorious stiffness with voters and inability to adjust to his audience, but most reporters are just trying to wrap up their latest Romney profile before deadline. With the broad outlines of the candidate’s personal and political history already established, the press is left with little to gnaw on besides a daily laugh-track of awkward moments.
The Romney campaign has only itself to blame for the media’s skimpy supply of substantive quotations. If the news cycle is a hungry beast, Mitt Romney is starving it. His campaign guards its candidate closely, rarely making Romney available for press avails and earning a reputation for excessive secrecy and stonewalling. A furor erupted briefly this spring when an ostensibly misinformed staffer attempted to keep reporters from following Romney as he worked the rope line and schmoozed with the crowd at a campaign event. When Slate’s David Weigel notes that political reporter Philip Rucker is “now slumming it on the Romney beat,” he feels compelled to add an asterisk: “All I mean is that the Romney campaign doesn’t exactly reward the beat reporters with a ton of access.” Ashley Parker, the Times reporter embedded with Romney’s campaign, pens frequent on-the-road dispatches about the rarity of Romney’s appearance on the press bus — he occasionally brings snacks, it seems, and jokes about the quality of the sub sandwiches. John McCain’s reporter-friendly Straight Talk Express this is not.
Yesterday, Parker explained Romney’s own culpability in the explosion of gaffe coverage by observing that Boston’s determination to “build a low-risk campaign” by “holding infrequent news conferences, limiting the national news media’s access to him and now planning a foreign trip whose first stop included few public events” has resulted in “a campaign that, rather than making news and controlling the script, often finds itself scrambling to catch up.” Parker also hits on Obama’s contrasting strategy, which leverages the bully pulpit of the presidency to win positive (or at least neutral) media coverage. If anything, Obama talks too much, delivering 56-minute speeches on the economy that provide ample fodder for the cut-and-pasters at the RNC to splice together controversial-sounding statements. Romney, on the other hand, compounds his errors:
But the situation was magnified by the schedule. On Friday, Mr. Romney attended the Olympics opening ceremony, but held no public events, except an appearance on the “Today” show, where he tried to walk back his original comments. On Thursday, his day was full of photo opportunities rather than moments for actual news-making.
The aforementioned Philip Rucker, in an article for the Washington Post that skews more toward analysis/opinion than straight news, points out that the Romney campaign is not doing itself any favors. It’s a piece focused less on what happened in London than on how the team in Boston — and it really is Boston, as the most senior adviser on the trip is Saul — mishandled it. “Romney’s advisers said they hoped to use his London visit to showcase his Olympics story,” Rucker writes. “Yet although he sat for three major television interviews against the backdrop of the London Games, he said little new about his own Olympic experience. Nor did he stage any photo ops, such as events with athletes or tours of Olympic venues, that might draw media attention to the subject.” Rucker continues:
Meanwhile, despite his aggressiveness in a speech Tuesday in Reno, Nev., Romney has declined to criticize Obama’s foreign policy or detail any of his own proposals while overseas.
So in the absence of any new biographical narrative or policy pronouncements, the media coverage of Romney’s trip has centered on his Olympics gaffe — and the result has been brutal for the candidate.
This reluctance to offer any real substance is typical of the Republican candidate. He promises his fiscal plan will balance the budget, yet refuses to detail which tax breaks he’d allow to expire. (The popular mortgage-interest deduction? Employer-sponsored health care? Romney’s not saying.) He wants to take credit for creating “100,000 jobs, net-net” at Bain but refuses to discuss the employees axed and factories shuttered on his watch. His most relevant political experience — four years in the Massachusetts statehouse — is absolutely off-limits, as it includes the conservative bete noire of “Romneycare.” At The New Republic, Ed Kilgore refers to such amnesia as “Mitt Romney’s incredible shrinking biography.” The problem is, when you shrink the biography, you’re not left with much else. Ergo, hello “Anglo-Saxon heritage” and the classic “I’m also unemployed” (spoken to a group of actually unemployed voters in Florida).
The best example of reticence in Romney-land comes via the men’s magazine GQ, which has covered Romney with admirable persistence and a respectable number of column-inches. Granted, the coverage has not been particularly positive (this title says it all: “Does Mitt Romney Have a Soul?”), but as Wells Tower details in the latest installment of the Romney Travel Chronicles, the candidate himself may be partially to blame. Tower’s five months on the trail confirmed the campaign’s cone-of-silence strategy:
Thanks to his campaign’s all but unprecedented restrictive vigilance in the media-access department, trying to penetrate the veneer of the Romney brand is like trying to split a billiard ball with a butter knife . . . . In lieu of actual access, you will be reduced to spending many stageside hours formulating new descriptions of the governor’s hair and speculating on which side he dresses to. (The evidence suggests it’s the left.)
Romney’s refusal to engage with the media leaves Tower bitter, to say the least. “You will meet a classmate of the candidate’s who will offer intel like ‘He got people to cheer at football games’ and feel like you scored a scoop,” he writes. Just to sample Tower’s characteristic cynicism: Romney’s stump speech is filled with “flavorless nubs,” looking for the non-robot Romney is like “searching for croutons of truth in a B.S. salad,” and the ultimate verdict on the Republican nominee’s attacks on Obama comes down to this:
It’s distressing not only that the son of a bajillionaire governor whose aspirations to the presidency he inherited with his father’s jawline would accuse the mixed-race kid of a decidedly unrich single mom of failing to “understand the power of dreams.”
Ouch. All those months following Romney around the country apparently did not induce Tower to drink the GOP Kool-Aid. Andrea Saul would probably dismiss the GQ article as a classic example of liberal media bias — though to be fair, the magazine that maintains a compendium of sexy “Girls on the Street” snapshots and has a regular feature called “Swagger-Jacking the Week in Style” doesn’t pretend to be a serious, neutral publication — and indeed, the conservative blogosphere has already tagged the piece as a “lengthy hatchet job” written by someone clearly working for “Team Obama.”
The most relevant bits demonstrate the extent of reporters’ frustration with, uh, “Team Romney” and the way in which the campaign’s reticence leads the press to focus on the only new information they get: gaffes. He describes the journalists of the press pool as “inmates of a not very fun sleepaway camp where you endure the same program of activities day in, day out, growing ever more desperate for the teensiest divergence from the standard routine.” The biggest risk for Romney is perhaps not what he actually says but the boredom he cultivates among the reporters who accompany him. Bored writers will seize on anything for a story — and, as this excerpt from Tower’s article tracking the birth of a Mitt Moment shows, they often do.
Back at the bus, the massive news is that an AP reporter has dug up a wire story about Mitt’s visit that day to the racetrack at Daytona. The story, buried deep on the sports wire, contains the now infamous quote: “I have some great friends who are NASCAR-team owners.”
A sports journalist evidently got the quote down at the track. The AP reporter, whose name is Kasie, well aware of the shitstorm the quote potentially poses for Romney, tracks down the sportswriter’s number and calls him as he’s eating dinner somewhere to be sure the quote is solid, unedited, and national-press-bus-consumption-grade stuff.
When he e-mails her the audio file, Kasie calls out to the bus, “Asked if he follows NASCAR, [Romney] said, ‘Not as closely as some of the most ardent fans. But I have some great friends who are NASCAR-team owners.’ The quote is whole and altogether. No ellipses!”
“Wow,” says Barbaro of The New York Times. “Can we use it?”
“You can use it,” says Kasie.
Within seconds, everybody has gobbled it up: the Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Good Morning America, some bloggers, NPR. Ari Shapiro is already recording a spot citing the quote for tomorrow morning’s broadcast, which he records under his jacket in the seat behind me: “…he may have done some damage by drawing attention to his wealth once again.”
Some television person is saying, “We definitely want to make sure that this gets into all the shows tomorrow.”
“Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” someone shouts.
Tower pre-empts accusations that such excitement proves the existence of a far-left “Lamestream Media” cabal jumping on anything remotely negative about the Republican candidate. “Just to be clear,” he writes, “the thrill here doesn’t have the feel of a liberal-media feeding frenzy so much as the joy of people who, after many days of being force-fed the same ‘I love the hymns of America’ wheat paste all day every day, have finally filched a good crunchy crouton from their minders.” Instead, the frantic search for anything “that makes the horse race more entertaining for the viewers at home” turns the NASCAR remark into a hot story: “By the following day—ratified by just about every newscast, opinion page, and late-night comic in the land—the quote is firmly bedded in the historical record of how the 2012 horse race went down.”
There is ample evidence that a similar dynamic was at work in London on Thursday. A rant by NBC’s otherwise even-handed Chuck Todd was peeved enough to catch the eye of two bloggers at Politico. For a candidate’s interaction with the press to merit a coverage-of-the-coverage blog entry like Todd’s is unusual. In this case, after meeting with Labour party leader Ed Miliband (whose name, in a blooper that garnered further ink in the British press, Romney seemed to forget), Romney broke protocol by answering questions from British reporters while refusing to respond to the Americans who’d trekked across the pond to cover him:
Even bringing this up will lead some to say, “There goes the media, whining again.” But folks, those of us that have traveled overseas and been involved in these VERY limited press avails have rarely seen heads of democracies TOTALLY ignore their own press corps but answer ANOTHER press corps’ questions. Sure, it would have looked REALLY bad had Romney ignored the U.K. questions. But is the campaign so intent on limiting media access that the candidate won’t call an audible when standing next to a leader from another country who DOES want to take questions?
As you might gather from the heavy hand on the Caps Lock key, Todd is — in the words of Politico’s Dylan Byers — “mad as hell at the Romney campaign.” Like a good mainstream reporter, Todd makes sure to wave the false equivalency flag, contending that the White House has also amped up its restrictions on the media and observing primly that “this is a bipartisan challenge for the press corps.” Given the recent firestorm over news organizations allowing campaigns to to pre-approve and edit quotations, Todd may have a point when he suggests that an outsize need for message control crosses the aisle. But it’s hard to compare Obama — who gives the media plenty of speeches and statements to work with, and who makes press secretary Jay Carney available to the press every day — to Romney, whose interactions with reporters are far more likely to consist of one-sided, take-it-or-leave it e-mails from Andrea Saul. Is it really such a smart idea to antagonize the people responsible for sculpting your public image?
What’s more, Romney never seems to learn. About three seconds after I wrapped up this post, Philip Rucker offered this dispatch from Israel, the second stop on the Non-Apology Tour. A fundraising dinner scheduled for Monday evening in Jerusalem, at which mega-donor (as in, tens of millions) Sheldon Adelson will possibly be a bigger draw than the candidate himself, has been closed to the media. As Rucker reports, “The campaign’s decision to close the fundraiser to the press violates the ground rules it negotiated with news organizations in April, when Romney wrapped up the Republican nomination and began opening some of his finance events to the news media.” Those ground rules include allowing pool reporters access to fundraisers held in public venues — like the King David Hotel that will host the dinner. To add insult to injury, the Romney campaign then doubled down on secrecy, not only barring journalists from the event but refusing to tell them why. Though Romney spokesperson Rick Gorka was “pressed repeatedly by reporters to offer an explanation, Gorka said only that the fundraiser was ‘closed press.'” It’s enough to make you wonder whether Boston is running a deliberate operation, a la Newt Gingrich, to alienate the “liberal media.” Rucker, sounding as peeved as Chuck Todd, tosses out a possible explanation:
Romney has a history of delivering different messages to his donors when reporters are not present to hear them. At a closed-press fundraiser in Florida this spring, reporters from NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, without Romney’s knowledge, overheard the candidate outline new tax policy proposals and suggest that he might dramatically downsize the Department of Education and eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Ah. Yes, honesty does tend to weigh a politician down.
[Update (12:04 pm, 7/29): The Romney camp backtracks, deciding to open Monday’s fundraiser to the press “after complaints from the media and criticism from the Obama campaign — two things that the Republican’s aides apparently feared would overshadow the event.” Key “criticism” includes this priceless tweet from David Axelrod: “After London debacle, Romney team re-institutes Mittness Protection Program. Now media will be barred from his Jerusalem fundraiser.”]
If this is how Romney treats the media, no wonder it resorts to reporting on every blunder the robotic Republican makes. There’s no doubt that the Internet devotes a lot of space to relatively meaningless and short-lived missteps. But the Internet is an intrinsically silly place. Should we be surprised when “Romneyshambles” appears alongside slideshows of the 50 cutest pets and “I can haz cheeseburger” memes? For all the hue and cry, Romney’s denigration — no matter how inadvertent — of his host country has serious undertones. If he’s willing to lambaste Obama for referring to the Falkland Islands as the Maldives instead of the Malvinas, he should expect criticism for telling the Brits they lack the enthusiasm necessary to produce a successful Olympics. The American media may have hyped the story, but in the U.K. people drove the coverage. “British Conservatives, and media actually got pissed off at what they heard as an unhelpful insult,” David Weigel writes, noting that even “non-reporter staff” at his BBC interview were talking about the snub. “There was no rival campaign cooking this up,” he says. “There was no social media director making sure people tweeted it, or hashtagged it, or Google+’d it (if Google+ is still a thing).” At the Washington Post, Jonathan Bernstein also takes exception to the characterization of the Romney coverage as shallow.
Now, there’s a reasonable sidebar about whether the Brits are oversensitive, or about how intruding on local politics in a foreign nation is always a bit of a minefield — but the whole point of Romney’s trip was to show that he was no diplomatic lightweight. “But he was telling the truth” is hardly a defense for a diplomatic bungle. I have no problem with saying that the media should mention it as a portion of their reporting – that is a part of the context here – but it’s not “big, red, blinking box of text” material. This one isn’t a (American) press-created phony gaffe story. If the press is going to cover it, the story to cover is that Romney made a mess of his London trip.
And if Romney continues to come up short on policy basics and substantive ideas, if the only story his campaign deigns to provide is how he made a mess of his London trip, then he deserves every gaffe-devoted blog post and news segment he gets.
. . . So Well Read. . . 