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 Apologyregularly 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’s Mitt Romney’s Apology Tour. Never before in American Massachusetts history has its president governor gone before so many foreign out-of-state audiences to apologize for so many American Bay State misdeeds, both real and imagined. It is his ways of signaling to foreign countries Red States and foreign Republican leaders that their dislike for America Massachusetts is something he understands and that is, at least in part, understandable. There are anti-American Massachusetts fires burning all across the globe;* President Obama’s Mitt Romney’s words are like kindling to them.

President Obama Mitt Romney, always the skillful politician, will throw in compliments about America Massachusetts here and there. But what makes speeches jump out at his audience are the steady stream of criticisms, put-downs, and jabs directed at the nation state he was elected to represent and defend.

In his first nine months and only term in office, President Obama has Mitt Romney issued apologies and criticisms of America Massachusetts in speeches in France, 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 City at 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 be American arrogance, dismissivieness, and derision Massachusetts’ liberalism, for dictating solutions, for acting unilaterally, and for acting without regard for others destroying the American family by leading on gay marriage, for treating other countries as mere proxies having a Senator with a weird tan, for unjustly interfering in the internal affairs of other nations demanding more taxes of him than would New Hampshire, and for feeding anti-Muslim sentiments too-generous welfare and unemployment benefits; for committing torture its refusal to execute prisoners, and for dragging out feet on global warming, and for selectively promoting democracy, supporting embryonic stem cell research. So critical was President Obama at his speech before the United Nations Mitt Romney of gay marriage in a speech to a gathering of Utah Republicans that 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.