Justin's Political Corner

The Raw Story: Harris-Perry on MSNBC’s Maddow: Romney would be Bush-but-worse on foreign policy

Friday night on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” guest host Melissa Harris-Perry attempted to glean a greater truth from all of the hullaballoo over Republican presidential candidate Gov. Mitt Romney (R-MA)’s disastrous trip to the 2012 London Summer Olympics. She compared and contrasted Romney’s trip abroad with then-Senator Barack Obama’s trip overseas in the summer of 2008, which, as Harris-Perry said, many foreign statesmen treated Obama as a “president-in-waiting” and audiences treated him like a rock star.

As Britons laughed themselves silly over Romney’s seeming inability to open his mouth without landing one or both feet in it, here in the U.S. Romney surrogates Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) and Gov. Bob McDonnell tried to make hay of Team Romney’s mistakes, saying things like, “We’re not worried about overseas headlines. We’re worried about voters back here at home in America.” (Jindal)

“President George W. Bush urged Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to move toward a more democratic posture, but President Obama abandoned the freedom agenda and we are seeing today a whirlwind of tumult in the Middle East in part because these nations did not embrace the reforms that could have changed the course of their history, in a more peaceful manner,” Romney said.

In other words, Romney believes that the problem with Bush’s invade-your-way-to-freedom policies was that they didn’t go far enough.

“He thinks George W. Bush was doing it right,” Harris-Perry said, “and that’s where he wants to take the country and the world.”