Daum: Romney's sorry state

When it comes to apologies, some people are like scent hounds: They can sniff them out anywhere. This is especially true when it comes to the supposed regrets and self-hatred of President Obama. Though he began his term with a series of speeches in Europe, Latin America and the Middle East in which, according to several fact-checking sources, the words "apology" or "I'm sorry" were never once uttered, his opponents nonetheless decided to construe the trips as some sort of mea culpa (make that Americana culpa) world tour. (Can't you just picture it on a heavy metal concert T-shirt?)

Hence the concept of the "apology tour." It originated in April 2009, when Karl Rove, advisor to George W. Bush, wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed saying, "Mr. Obama ... assumes that if he confesses America's sins, other nations will confess theirs and change."

Rove was known as Bush's strategy "architect," but he wasn't necessarily a brilliant ad man. The phrase "apology tour" appeared not in the column but in the headline, which means it was almost definitely coined not by Rove but by an editor on headline writing duty that day. If that editor worked in marketing instead of journalism, he or she probably would be running an agency now because the idea of Obama as "apologizer in chief" has turned into a winning brand, a key selling point for Republicans looking to paint the president as un-American.

Mitt Romney is among those who have long trafficked in the Obama-as-apologist narrative (that is, when he's not complaining about the Obama campaign's refusal to apologize for digs against his record at Bain Capital). Before things went sour for Romney this week — when a video surfaced in which he wrote off the 47% of Americans who "will vote for the president no matter what" and are, among other things, "dependent on government" and "pay no income tax" — Romney was already struggling to control his latest version of the apologist-in-chief message.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-daum-romney-obama-apology-tour-20120920,0,3651405.column