The day before the Florida primary, Mitt Romney tried to sing “America the Beautiful” at a campaign event, and botched the lyrics…twice. He made the mistake most children make during the song: appending an “s” to “mountain” in the line “For purple mountain majesties”…while making “majesties” singular. At that point, I wondered: Does this guy get ANYTHING right?
This wasn’t a one-time occurrence. Mitt botches that gosh-darned line every time he recites it. And he LOVES to recite it. (Presumably, Mitt isn’t aware that the words were penned by Katharine Lee Bates—who, in a later verse, recognized that our nation had flaws in need of mending.)
It’s as if Mitt thinks that by invoking some verse about our country’s magnificence, he’s demonstrating how great of a statesman he’d be. The thing is, to this day, nobody has brought to Mitt’s attention that he keeps saying the line wrong.
“Hey, Mitt,” an aid might say. “We get it. You love America. FYI: It’s ‘purple mountain’, without the ‘s’, because ‘purple mountain’ is an adjective. And, by the way, it’s not just one ‘majesty’. Anyway, please, for the love of Jehovah, find some new material.”
I focus on this matter not to be petty. Indeed, it is a trivial matter. I mention it because it illustrates so much about Mitt Romney. Much of what he says is simply wrong—far worse than mere syntax errors. Yet this is rarely brought to everyone’s attention.