At a campaign stop in Rockford, Ill., not long ago, Mitt Romney sought to convey his feelings for his wife, Ann. “Smitten,” he said.You want tortured syntax?
Not merely in love.
“Yeah, smitten,” he said. “Mitt was smitten.”
It was a classic Mittism, as friends and advisers call the verbal quirks of the Republican presidential candidate. In Romneyspeak, passengers do not get off airplanes, they “disembark.” People do not laugh, they “guffaw.” Criminals do not go to jail, they land in the “big house.” Insults are not hurled, “brickbats” are.
As he seeks the office of commander in chief, Mr. Romney can sometimes seem like an editor in chief, employing a language all his own. It is polite, formal and at times anachronistic, linguistically setting apart a man who frequently struggles to sell himself to the American electorate.
It is most pronounced when he is on the stump and off the cuff, not on the stuffy and rehearsed debate stage. But Mr. Romney offered voters a dose of it during his face-off with President Obama last week, when he coined the infelicitous phrase “binders full of women.”
Mr. Romney’s unique style of speaking has distinguished him throughout his career, influencing the word choices of those who work with and especially for him. Should he reach the White House, friends and advisers concede, the trait could be a defining feature of his public image, as memorable as Lyndon B. Johnson’s foul-mouthed utterances or the first President Bush’s tortured syntax.
Listen to Obama:
"We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick."
"We are the ones we've been waiting for."
Without his teleprompter, Obama often sounds like an idiot.
Has any president in our history said "uh" and "um" more than Obama?
Furthermore, did Obama mean to make these statements?
"If four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal."
Referring to the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi: "But I was pretty certain and continue to be pretty certain that there are going to be bumps in the road."
Then there's the allegedly brilliant Obama's many verbal flubs:
Try Obama's "corpse-man."
Try Obama's "e-pants-ipation."
Try Obama's "Cominskey Field."
But there isn't a New York Times article detailing Obama's strained speech patterns, his mispronunciations, and his bizarre verbal oddities.
Noooooo, not the brilliant Obama.
The person to be ridiculed as speaking in "throwback language" is Mitt Romney.
Mr. Romney, 65, has spent four decades inside the corridors of high finance and state politics, where indecorous diction and vulgarisms abound. But he has emerged as if in a rhetorical time capsule from a well-mannered era of soda fountains and AMC Ramblers, someone whose idea of swearing is to let loose with the phrase “H-E-double hockey sticks.”This is so condescending.
“He actually said that,” recalled Thomas Finneran, the speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives when Mr. Romney was governor. “As in, go to ‘H-E-double hockey sticks.’ I would think to myself, ‘Who talks like that?’ ”
Mr. Romney, quite proudly. In fact, he seems puzzled by the fascination with something as instinctive (and immutable) as how he talks, as if somebody were asking how he breathes. “It’s like someone who speaks with an accent,” he said in an interview. “You don’t hear the accent.”
...Those around him are so accustomed to his verbal tics that they describe them in shorthand. “Old-timey,” said one aide. “His 1950s language,” explained another. “The Gomer Pyle routine,” said a third.
Asked about his boss’s word preferences, Eric Fehrnstrom, a veteran Romney adviser, responded knowingly: “You mean like ‘gosh, golly, darn’?”
For Democratic strategists, Mr. Romney’s throwback vocabulary feeds into their portrayal of a man ill-equipped for the mores and challenges of the modern age. David Axelrod, a top adviser for an Obama campaign that has adopted “Forward” as its slogan, once quipped that Mr. Romney “must watch ‘Mad Men,’ ” the hit television show set in Manhattan in the 1960s, “and think it’s the evening news.”
His exclamations can sound jarring to the contemporary ear — or charming, depending on whom you ask. Midway into a critique of Mr. Obama’s economic policies a few months ago, Mr. Romney declared: “They’ve scared the dickens out of banks,” he said. “They’ve scared the dickens out of insurance companies.”
The "contemporary ear" is a subjective thing. There's an arrogance in assuming one can successfully define it. From my perspective, the "contemporary ear" of the New York Times is missing a lot. There's a deafness.
Get out of the liberal bubble. Come to the middle of the country. Talk to REAL PEOPLE in the heartland.
You're going to hear "gosh, golly, darn." You're going to hear "Thank heavens" and "heck."
The libs' assertion that Romney's "verbal tics" reveal him to be "a man ill-equipped for the mores and challenges of the modern age" is insulting to a lot of us functioning quite well in the 21st century. If they believe Romney's "throwback language" is an issue for him, struggling "to sell himself to the American electorate," they don't know the American electorate.
They really don't understand Americans. They lead such an insular existence. They need to get out and open their "contemporary ears."
Gosh, why the heck are these Leftists so darn out of touch? Golly, they aren't too bright.
