Travel is so broadening

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

One thing we know this week for sure that was not quite so clear before is that Mitt Romney is not ready for the big leagues.

Last week Mitt Romney took his show on the road, expecting excellent reviews. He emerged from his first two performances (UK, Israel) covered in rotten tomatoes. About the only thing he can do in his last show to top off his act in London and Jerusalem would be to tell a Polish joke.    

Early in my college/graduate school years, our English professor assigned a text with the same title as this article. It was a delicious exercise in irony. “Garbage in, garbage out” is the skeptics’ rebuttal to those who perform complex statistical analysis on bad data. Travel, as the characters in “Travel Is so Broadening” demonstrate with a hilarity only exceeded by Romney’s recent foreign adventure, is no different. You take your prejudices, arrogance, and ignorance with you, and they color and distort and determine your actions and reactions. Or, in the elegant Buddhist formulation, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

So there was Mitt in the big city. Paris may have been a party (“París” era una fiesta is the Spanish title of translations of Hemingway’s “A Moveable Feast”) for American expatriates in the 1920s but London in 2012 was, for Mitt, anything but. It was more like a funeral, the death knell to Romney’s pretensions of establishing his foreign policy credentials by briefly stopping by all of three countries. 

The brevity of the trip and the chosen roster of very friendly countries were all designed to prevent Romney from messing all over himself as his own longsuffering dog did on that infamous twelve-hour torture trip atop one of the many Romney family cars. After all, how do you screw up a very short visit to the capital of your closest ally, a nation moreover ruled by fellow conservatives? Romney managed to do it – in spades.

How did he pull it off? Let me count some of the ways. You start by suggesting that London, which was a thriving metropolis centuries before Joseph Smith concocted Mormonism, is not quite ready to host the Olympic Games. The subtext of that insult adds invidious comparison to injury. Mitt Romney once successfully organized a Winter Olympics – in Salt Lake City.

The British were not amused by the snap judgment of an interloper who just had parachuted into their country. The Mayor of London had an acid British retort. It is not the same thing, he pointed out, to hold the Olympics “in the middle of nowhere” than in a complex city like London.

That had to hurt. Salt Lake City, the middle of nowhere, is to Mormons almost what Mecca is to Muslims. And Romney, whose ever-changing policy stances make it appear as if he believes in nothing, is surely a cynic but he is no nihilist. He does believe, fervently, in two things: Mormonism and money.

Follow that cardinal sin – Miss Manners could have told Romney you don’t criticize how your hosts keep house – by saying that, among a series of other important public figures, he had met with the head of MI6.

MI6! That’s the ultra-secretive British spy agency whose chief is decidedly not a public figure. No doubt Romney referred to the meeting to show he was an insider in the world of intelligence. Instead, he showed just the opposite, in both senses of the word intelligence. Whether someone told Romney directly or not, he who aspires to be commander-in-chief needs to know the way key government institutions work in the nation you are closest to in the world. A person with commonsense would implicitly realize that a meeting between the head of MI6 and an American presidential candidate would be by definition secret.

Mitt’s disclosure of a friendly country’s secrets is all the more damning because it comes in the wake of weeks of specious accusations by Romney that the Obama administration had leaked classified information to maximize its political gain from the killing of Osama Bin-Laden.   

Romney’s gaffe, a product of a futile attempt to match up with the president on foreign policy savvy, also had to embarrass the British government. The people of the UK don’t know the identity of the head of MI6. What business does this foreigner with no official standing have meeting with her or him? Plus, Barack Obama is still President of the United States, and he might still be in the White House during four more years. The British government must be thrilled that the whole world and the Obama administration now know that British leaders consented to a meeting between a private U.S. citizen who happens to be the U.S. president’s chief nemesis and the faceless honcho of MI6.

Israel was no great improvement. The highlight of Romney’s stop in Israel was a statement by one of his top advisers, Dan Senor, infamous for his role as the chief propagandist for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the first occupation government after the U.S. invasion to Iraq, that issued rosy assessments while setting the stage for the looming disaster. Senor told the media that it would be OK with Romney if Israel decided to attack Iran on its own initiative, in other words without the explicit approval and support of Israel’s one and only real friend in the world, which fortunately for Israel just happens to be the United States, the military and geopolitical equivalent of the proverbial 900-pound gorilla.

It is always bad news for anyone auditioning for the part of the world’s most powerful leader to be upstaged by a mere adviser, and hardly a Kissinger or a Brzezinski at that. When the adviser’s bellicose rhetoric exceeds even that of his very hawkish boss, who then is forced to reassure the war-weary American people that he is not going to attack Iran on day one of his presidency, you know the candidate’s foreign policy team doesn’t have its act together.

Americans don’t care much about foreign affairs so the biggest factor in this election is going to be the economy. On that score the latest data don’t good look for Obama. But the president is still ahead of Romney in most key states according to the polls. Anything could happen. While it may not decide the election, what Romney’s three-cornered sojourn amply demonstrated is that, should he become president, U.S. foreign policy is likely to revert to the bad old days of George W. Bush.