Dr. Word says: Romney is no master of the “elegantly stated” statement

by David Safier

Dr. Word thinks Mitt Romney is being too hard on himself when he maintains his 47 percent comments were "not elegantly stated" because he "was speaking off the cuff." His cuffs are permanently soiled and threadbare, whether his words are prepared or spontaneous.

Witness the wording of Romney's attempt to respin his "47 percent" comment in front of a Hispanic audience on Univision: "My campaign is about the 100 percent in America." One can only assume that sentence was crafted by a highly paid speech writer, but it is the verbal equivalent of dancing Swan Lake in hiking boots. It tromps through the mud rather than sweeping lightly across the ear.

In the same article, Romney attempts to find words to capture how inept Obama has been at handling the economy. "Inelegant" does not begin to capture the clunkiness of his phrasing:

[Obama] can't win by his words, because his record speaks so loudly in our ears. What he has done in the last four years is establish an economy that's bumping along the bottom."

Where to start? "Can't win by his words." "His record speaks so loudly in our ears." "What he has done . . . is." "An economy that's bumping along the bottom." A high school student running for sophomore class president would be criticized by his English teacher if his speech were so inelegantly worded.

Romney has his shoes on backward, verbally speaking, when he presents himself in his own words. But one would think his writers would be able to do better than this.