Romney's Gaffes Aren't Gaffes

They're just an expression of his true worldview:

These sorts of trips, Krauthammer said on Fox News Thursday night, are easy. You express solidarity with the allies, listen, nod your head, and say nice things or nothing at all. Instead, Romney questioned his hosts’ ability to run the Olympics, raised doubts about Londoners’ community spirit, and violated protocol by publicly mentioning a meeting with the head of MI-6. “It’s unbelievable, it’s beyond human understanding, it’s incomprehensible,” Krauthammer, normally a paragon of self-confidence, sputtered. “I’m out of adjectives … I don’t get it.” The thing that Krauthammer doesn’t get is that Romney is not the sort of businessman—that his brand of capitalism is not the sort of enterprise—that requires even the most elementary understanding of diplomacy, courtesy, or sensitivity to other people’s values, lives, or perceptions.

Meanwhile, John Cassidy says that the whole affair is a reminder of why the Romney campaign keeps such a tight rein on their candidate. He simply doesn't have the prudence of a polished, experienced politician:

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. A regular pol would say something like: “Well, Brian, we all know that staging an Olympics is a massive task. Recently, our British friends have been encountering some issues with security and transportation arrangements, but I’m sure they’ll work things out, and that once the Games start they’ll be a resounding success.”