Piling on, because Yes, we can! John Cassidy, at his New Yorker Rational Irrationality blog, on “Mitt the Wazzock“:
…“Every Olympics is ready,” [sprinter Carl] Lewis, who won nine gold medals at four different Olympics, told the Independent. “I don’t care whatever [Romney] said. I swear, sometimes I think some Americans shouldn’t leave the country. Are you kidding me, stay home if you don’t know what to say.”…
The whole thing is another reminder of why the Romney campaign keeps such tight reins on the candidate. Despite his four years in elected office in Massachusetts and his experience in two Presidential campaigns, he still lacks the political antennae of a lifelong politician. The true pol is a master of what game theorists refer to as “backward induction.” Before doing or saying anything, a filtering mechanism in his (or her) brain looks ahead and figures out how it is going to look in tomorrow’s newspapers. For somebody like John Boehner or Chuck Schumer, it no longer takes any conscious effort. The filtering mechanism works automatically, ensuring that the voice box serves up nothing but pablum and political attack lines.
Romney just doesn’t have this self-preservation instinct. He is still naïve or arrogant enough to think that when Brian Williams asks him a seemingly harmless question about the preparations for the Games, which have certainly encountered some problems, it is an opportunity for him to demonstrate his mastery of the subject…
Small wonder, then, that when Boris Johnson, London’s voluble Conservative mayor, took the stage in Hyde Park on Thursday night, at a ceremony to mark the arrival of the Olympic torch, he openly mocked the G.O.P. candidate before a crowd of more than fifty thousand…
At the end of the ceremony, Johnson led the crowd in a chant that brought to mind one of Obama’s campaign slogans from 2008.
“Can we put on the greatest Olympics games that have ever been held?” “Yes we can!”…
Didn’t see that chant on any of the American news reports, for some reason…
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Apart from sweet, sweet schadenfreude, what’s on the agenda for the evening?
Open Thread: Yes, <em>We</em> Can; You, Mr. Romney, Not So MuchPost + Comments (138)