Thursday was supposed to be the easy day, when Mitt Romney would
audition as a world leader here by talking about his shared values with the
heads of the United States’ friendliest ally.
Instead, the Republican
presidential candidate insulted Britain as it welcomed the world for the
Olympics by casting doubt on London’s readiness for the Games, which open
Friday, saying that the preparations he had seen were “disconcerting” and that
it is “hard to know
just how well it will turn out.”
The comments drew a swift
rebuke from Prime Minister David Cameron and, by day’s end, a public
tongue-lashing by the city’s mayor as the Olympic torch arrived in Hyde Park.
“I hear there’s a guy called Mitt Romney who wants to know whether
we’re ready,” Mayor Boris Johnson cried out to a crowd of at least 60,000. “He
wants to know whether we’re ready. Are we ready? Are we ready? Yes, we are.”
Cameron, responding to the
candidate with a note of irritation, said that “of course it’s easier if you
hold an Olympic Games in the middle of nowhere,” an apparent reference to Salt
Lake City. That city held the 2002 Olympic Winter Games, which Romney
organized. The prime minister and the mayor are conservatives, making their
scolding all the more embarrassing for the candidate, an otherwise sympathetic
ideological ally.
It was a difficult start to
Romney’s first foray on the international stage as the presumptive Republican
nominee, one that was supposed to present him to U.S. voters as a potential
commander in chief. Beyond his Olympics remarks, Romney had a series of
uncomfortable moments — some of them seemingly minor, but distractions
nonetheless.
At one point, he told
reporters about his previously undisclosed meeting with the head of the MI-6,
Britain’s secret intelligence agency.
On the first official day of
his six-day overseas tour, Romney declined to answer reporters’ questions about
his foreign policy positions , saying he will avoid talking about any policy specifics
while he is on foreign soil.
He ended the day in a scene
that could prove damaging for a candidate sometimes labeled as out of touch. A
dinner fundraiser, which raised $2 million, was co-hosted by executives at
banks under investigation in London’s rate-fixing scandal.
For any candidate on a foreign
trip, the margin for error is small, with every misstep magnified, fairly or
not — especially so for Romney, whose visit is drawing inevitable comparisons
to Barack Obama’s largely successful foreign tour as a candidate in 2008.
The notoriously harsh British
media spewed out brutal headlines about what they almost uniformly deemed a
bomb of a debut for Romney. The criticism reverberated across the Atlantic and
into the United States, overshadowing a day in which Romney wanted to polish
his diplomatic credentials, although his surrogates insisted that they were not
worried about overseas coverage.
Olympics organizers have had
to cope with a series of security blunders, including a disclosure that the
private contractor hired to provide guards for the Games was 3,500 staff
members short. The military scrambled to fill in the gap.
Still, the hosts did not seem
to appreciate a foreign visitor reminding them about the problems. Romney
voiced his doubts about the final preparations for the Olympics during an
interview with NBC News’s Brian Williams, taped Wednesday as he began his trip.
Cameron responded by telling
reporters on Thursday: “You’re going to see beyond doubt that Britain can
deliver.”
He added: “We are holding an
Olympic Games in one of the busiest, most active, bustling cities anywhere in
the world.”
A headline Thursday on the Web
site of the Guardian newspaper said, “Mitt Romney’s Olympics blunder stuns No.
10 and hands gift to Obama,” while the Telegraph published an opinion column
with a sub-headline that read: “Mitt Romney is perhaps the only politician who
could start a trip that was supposed to be a charm offensive by being utterly
devoid of charm and mildly offensive.”
By Thursday, in back-to-back
meetings with British officials, Romney was lavishing praise on London’s
Olympics efforts. He said that “it is impossible for absolutely no mistakes to
occur” at any Olympic Games. And in an appearance with Cameron in the formal
White Room at 10 Downing St., he pronounced the Games “fabulous.”
“I was watching last night the torch relay coming across Great
Britain and the stories about that, and the enthusiasm and passion,” he said.
“And I love the theme, ‘Inspire a Generation.’ ”
Later, Romney told reporters,
“My experience as an Olympic organizer is that there are always a few very
small things that end up going not quite right in the first day or so. Those
get ironed out and then when the Games themselves begin and the athletes take
over, all the mistakes that the organizing committee — and I made a few — all
of those are overwhelmed by the many things that the athletes carry out that
capture the spirit of the Games.”
Romney passed on several
opportunities to discuss his foreign policy proposals. He told reporters that
he had spoken to British leaders about the global economy and the world’s hot
spots — including Syria, Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan — but insisted that he
would not describe his positions while traveling abroad.
Several hours later, Romney
campaign aides hastily arranged a briefing for reporters with a campaign
adviser who attended the meetings to provide a more substantive window into the
talks.
The adviser, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity, said that concern about the U.S. and British economies,
coupled with fear of global fallout from the European debt crisis, consumed
many of the meetings.
The leaders discussed recent
developments in Syria and Iran, although Romney did not say how he would handle
the crises because he did not want to “make his own foreign policy” while
overseas, the adviser said.
Romney’s visit to Britain,
where the country’s leaders boast of its long-standing “special relationship”
with the United States, was expected to be a relatively easy stop,
diplomatically speaking, on his foreign tour. From here, he will navigate more
difficult terrain in Israel and Poland.
But in London, Romney hit a
few other rough patches as well. During a morning press appearance with Ed
Miliband, head of the opposition Labor Party, the candidate broke with typical
protocol. While Miliband called on two British journalists to ask questions,
which Romney answered, Romney did not call on any U.S. journalists.
While visiting with Foreign
Secretary William Hague at the stately Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Romney
also met with the leader of the MI-6, the intelligence agency. The meeting was
not on Romney’s public schedule, but the candidate referred to it in his
remarks to reporters, saying they “discussed Syria and the hope for a more peaceful
future for that country.”
At the evening fundraiser,
held at the five-star Mandarin Oriental hotel, Romney showed no signs that
anything had gone awry. He mused about his heartstrings being tugged as he
drove past a statue of former prime minister Winston Churchill — “with him
larger than life, enormous heft of that sculpture suggesting the scale, and the
grandeur and the greatness of the man” — and his interview with CNN’s Piers
Morgan, who he noted “did a fine job.”
“It has been a marvelous day for us,” Romney said.
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