More Willard for the day

Michael Crowley has a Time article about Willard and his big mouth:

For a good long while, Mitt Romney was the luckiest man in politics. He joined the 2012 race as the default Republican front-runner after more formidable challengers chose not to run. His declared rivals were at turns ineffectual (Tim Pawlenty), ridiculous (Herman Cain), or self-destructive (Newt Gingrich), granting Mitt a fairly easy if occasionally fraught path to the nomination. An economic recovery that might have made challenging Barack Obama pointless never materialized. For a time, you might say, all the trees seemed to be the right height. As he wrapped up his primary campaign, the conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer, skeptical of Romney’s innate abilities, urged the would-be nominee to “pray for yet more luck, the quality Napoleon famously valued in his generals above all others.”
More recently, however, Romney’s luck has turned. His campaign has been star-crossed, veering from one minor disaster to another. The latest example is the emergence of Romney’s covertly recorded observation at a Florida fundraiser that the 47 percent of Americans who pay no federal income taxes will never vote for him because they “believe they are victims” entitled to endless government support and by the way will never “take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” Not to generalize or anything. This just days after Romney’s rash statement late on the night of 11 September suggesting that the Obama administration “sympathized” with the violent mobs in Cairo and Benghazi.
Before that there was a convention to forget: Clint Eastwood versus an empty chair. Romney’s failure to mention Afghanistan. And the way the Democrats’ big speakers (Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama) outshone the GOP’s ho-hums and flops (Marco Rubio and Chris Christie).
Before that was a summer of woe: Democrats murdered Romney in the free media wars that establish the campaign’s narrative. They skillfully dribbled factoids about Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital onto liberal blogs, chum that successfully drew the big-media sharks. The Senate Minority Leader mounted an insidiously effective innuendo campaign in which he repeated unproven allegations that Romney had paid no income taxes for a decade. Someone even alerted the Washington Post to Romney’s boyhood bullying.
And let’s not forget some other ignoble moments. Like the putatively statesmanlike overseas trip that became a media circus. Or the stunning Supreme Court ruling that upheld Obamacare, undermining an important Romney line of attack (and throwing his campaign into confusion about how to respond). Or the general-election opening Etch a Sketch moment. And now, the leaked video, with its tone of contempt for nearly half of America, whose creator remains unknown.
Conservatives will complain, not entirely without merit, that many of these episodes were overblown, whipped into a froth by a “gotcha” press corps that finds Romney unlovable or even ridiculous. It’s also true that Obama’s team has stepped in it more than once. (“You didn’t build that”; the over-reaching Super PAC ad effectively practically accusing Romney of manslaughter.)
But the fact is that Romney’s luck ran out long ago. And his unluckiness has revealed his limitations as a presidential candidate (and those of his campaign team). Romney’s fortunes may turn again. But for now, more than a few Republicans are wondering whether his nomination was their party’s rotten luck.

Rico says that, fortunately, he doesn't know anyone stupid enough to actually vote for Willard...