Among the upsides for Mitt Romney possibly making a third bid for the Republican presidential nomination is that he’s had lots of practice, but the downside is so many journalists on the politics beat remember how funny they thought it was to watch him do it in 2012.
During the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney made a series of unscripted public statements that inspired news outlets to extraordinary bouts of parsing his possible meaning, examining his sense of humor and sometimes even laughing at him for appearing out of touch with everyday Americans.
Among the most frequently mocked lines from the 2012 cycle was Romney’s “I love Big Bird.” The line, uttered during one of the three general election debates with President Obama, was part of Romney’s assertion that should he land in the White House, he would attempt to cut public funding to PBS.
ABC’s Rick Klein tweeted immediately after the remark that he had sought comment from the actual Big Bird from PBS’s Sesame Street. The Washington Post was moved to even write a fact-check: “Does Mitt Romney want to ‘kill’ Big Bird?”
In another debate, Romney expressed support of workplace equality for women, but then remarked that when he was governor of Massachusetts, he had consulted “binders full of women” in order to fill out his cabinet with more women.
“ ‘Binders full of women’ now has a binder full of jokes,” read the headline on a New York Times roundup of how supposedly funny the remark was. The Daily Beast dubbed it a “gender gaffe.”
Prior to the debate stumbles came the bizarre media obsession with Romney’s summer trip to a Wawa convenience store. He expressed delight during a campaign rally that Wawa stores feature computers that aid customers ordering sandwiches. He also used the anecdote to illustrate government inefficiency.
A BuzzFeed post emphasized that Romney pronounces it “Wawas” with an “S.” “Mitt Romney’s Wawa gaffe: Is he out of touch?” asked the International Business Times. Further complicating it was the fact the Wawa reference made little sense to millions of voters outside of the chain’s stores on the Eastern seaboard.
MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell had the misfortune of airing an edited clip on her show of Romney’s ode to Wawa, only to later have to admit that it had unfairly made Romney appear foolishly enamored by convenience store technology.
There were more: Romney, with all his wealth, admitting that his wife drives “a couple of Cadillacs;” rhetorically extending primary opponent Rick Perry a $10,000 bet; referring to the engagement of sports as “sport” and declaring his affinity for NASCAR because he knew several racing team owners.
