Just like the networks, The Washington Post aggressively presented Mitt Romney's Olympics remarks as an embarrassment that ruined the "easy day" of his foreign trip.
Reporter Philip Rucker raised the bar high, suggesting Romney was no match for Candidate Obama: "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." Rucker also underlined hostile British media coverage:
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.
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.”
Rucker also underlined an allegedly damaging fundraiser: "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."
Blink and you would miss Rucker acknowledging that Romney's remarks on Britain's problems with security are correct: "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." But "the hosts did not seem to appreciate a foreign visitor reminding them about the problems."
The headline on the inside page was "Britons chafe at Romney Olympics remark."
