Mitt Romney's Mass. Apology Tour
Mitt Romney’s central critique of the Obama administration’s foreign policy is that the President once took an “Apology Tour” around the world to excuse his country’s less popular behaviors.
Massachusetts’s central critique of Romney is that he took a tour around the country to mock his home state while still in office — an “Apology Tour” if you will.
Romney believes in the power of his narrative so strongly, he named his book No Apology, regularly promises voters he will “never apologize for America” in his stump speech, and brought up the Apology Tour during Monday’s foreign policy debate.
Massachusetts believes in the power of its narrative so strongly, that Barack Obama is outpolling Romney here by roughly 20 points.
We’ve played a little game of Mad Libs with the passage in Romney’s No Apology that focuses on Obama’s Apology Tour. We’ve replaced the bits relevant to Obama with our own examples, giving you the case for Romney’s Apology Tour for Massachusetts, using the logical and rhetorical flourishes of Mitt Romney.
Key:
Plain text = Romney’s words, left untouched
Strikethrough = Romney’s words specific to Obama, deleted
Bold = Our words
… This sentiment manifests itself in several different ways including
President Obama’sMitt Romney’s Apology Tour. Never before inAmericanMassachusetts history has itspresidentgovernor gone before so manyforeignout-of-state audiences to apologize for so manyAmericanBay State misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his ways of signaling toforeign countriesRed States andforeignRepublican leaders that their dislike forAmericaMassachusetts is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable. There are anti-AmericanMassachusetts fires burning all across the globe;*President Obama’sMitt Romney’s words are like kindling to them.
President ObamaMitt Romney, always the skillful politician, will throw in compliments aboutAmericaMassachusetts here and there. But what makes speeches jump out at his audience are the steady stream of criticisms, put-downs, and jabs directed at thenationstate he was elected to represent and defend.In his first
nine monthsand only term in office,President Obama hasMitt Romney issued apologies and criticisms ofAmericaMassachusetts in speeches inFrance, England, Turkey and Cairo;South Carolina, New Hampshire, Utah and Missouri,at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, the National Archives in Washington, D.C., and the United Nations in New York Cityat campaign events in Manchester, at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., and at GOP events in Utah. He has apologized for what he deems to beAmerican arrogance, dismissivieness, and derisionMassachusetts’ liberalism, fordictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for othersdestroying the American family by leading on gay marriage, fortreating other countries as mere proxieshaving a Senator with a weird tan, forunjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nationsdemanding more taxes of him than would New Hampshire, and forfeeding anti-Muslim sentimentstoo-generous welfare and unemployment benefits; forcommitting tortureits refusal to execute prisoners, and fordragging out feet on global warming, and for selectively promoting democracy, supporting embryonic stem cell research. So critical wasPresident Obama at his speech before the United NationsMitt Romney of gay marriage in a speech to a gathering of Utah Republicansthat dictator Fidel Castro complimented him for his “brave gesture” and “courage” in criticizing the United States, that Joe Cannon, chairman of the Utah Republican Party said (with approval) “He’s never going to win the vote of the people who are generally sympathetic with that.”* Fine, there probably aren’t any anti-Massachusetts fires burning across the globe.
“But!” the Romney campaign might say, “Romney never actually apologized for Massachusetts!” This is similar to the criticism others have made of Romney’s “Apology Tour” line, which is that it is based on a lie. The Washington Post‘s fact checker notes that Obama’s repentant tour of the world did not feature an actual apology, and is basically a piece of folklore urged on by Karl Rove in the Wall Street Journal.
So there it is: The Mitt Romney Apology Tour for Massachusetts, in all its semi-exaggerated glory.