Elections & Political Parties

Steve Coll explores the Republican presidential hopeful's evolving foreign policy agenda and gaffe-ridden trip abroad. Jennifer Rowland illuminates the American group that poses a greater threat to our national security than al Qaeda. Elizabeth Weingarten hosts.

The notion that David Petraeus might be Mitt Romney’s running mate—the banner headline on the Drudge Report Tuesday—is preposterous on at least seven levels. Let’s look at them, one by one.

BEFORE HE EARNED his reputation as one of the best ad men in politics, before he wrote for several major television shows, and long before he became Mitt Romney’s top campaign strategist, Stuart Stevens found himself in Cameroon, face to face with a machine-gun-wielding soldier looking to shake him down. It was 1988, and a few weeks earlier, Stevens had deposited himself in the nearby Central African Republic to pick up a friend’s Land Rover and drive it back to France. But the trip was a disaster from the get-go. Local officials confiscated the car and refused to release it.

Christopher Leonard and Charles Kenny discuss the drought in the Midwest and its effects on food, fuel, and politics. Konstantin Kakaes hosts.

Matt Romney is back home from his three-country world tour, and the question must be asked: Has any presidential candidate—has any American politician of stature—splashed in so many muddy puddles along the way?

Looking back at the voyage, the “gaffes” in London (which weren’t so much gaffes as revelations of Romney’s character) turned out to be not the afterburn of jetlag, as some of his aides suggested, but rather a preview of coming attractions.

The humid lull between the party primaries and the party conventions is the traditional moment for a Presidential challenger to peacock abroad as a prospective Commander-in-Chief. Four years ago, Barack Obama cruised the Iraqi war zone in a helicopter, dazzled throngs in Europe with his then fresh rhetoric of change, and charmed American soldiers in a Kuwaiti gymnasium, where, with preternatural nonchalance, he lofted a three-point shot toward a distant rim. He drained the three, the soldiers roared, and, somewhere back home, John McCain slumped deeper into gloom.
 

Mitt Romney’s not-so-excellent adventure abroad (“Romneyshambles,” the Brits are calling it) has been many things: shabby, hilarious, scandalous, an enlivening hoot to a dreary election season. One thing it shouldn’t be, though, is surprising.
 
Charles Krauthammer, the right-wing commentator who usually finds every excuse to attack Barack Obama—he took Obama’s blinking during a tête-à-tête with Vladimir Putin as a sign of appeasement—pronounced himself befuddled by the GOP candidate’s flare of incompetence.
 

We've just witnessed an episode of political strategy of such creativity and nerve that journalists and political consultants may well be talking about it decades from now: Barack Obama's reelection campaign recast Mitt Romney's most formidable asset, his business career, from an image of a successful investor in startup businesses, to that of a trimmer, manipulator, tax-evader, and destroyer of value.

Call it the nostalgia tour. On Tuesday, when Mitt Romney leaves for his much-hyped international trip, he won’t merely be traveling overseas; he’ll be traveling back in time.

A number of commentators have wondered why the rigging of LIBOR—the most widely used interest-rate in the world—hasn’t caused the uproar in this country that it’s provoked in Britain. The easy answer is that no U.S. bank has fessed up or been outed over its role in manipulating LIBOR, unlike in Britain, where Barclays has agreed to pay nearly half a billion dollars in fines and fired its top three executives.