Romney, a Gaffe-Proof Candidate for Our Cynical Times

By Charles P. Pierce at 11:06AM

It is a capital mistake in judging an American political campaign to fail to take into account the effectiveness of the purely cynical. Over the past month or so, the campaign of Willard Romney, the onetime, one-term, now largely unrecognizable governor of Massachusetts, has engaged in a series of gaffes and missteps, a positive gavotte of dick-stepping both here and abroad, from which most political wise guys agree it should have difficulty recovering. He can't talk about domestic issues with sounding like the worst patrician foof in the history of watercress. He goes overseas and pisses off the Brits, praises the pale pink socialist wonderland that is the Israeli national health-care system while also gleefully tossing a few matches into the open gas tank of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, and, on the whole, demonstrates that, in the field of foreign policy, he'll pretty much believe anything he's told by the rags-and-bones neo-con retreads he's hired.