{"id":469,"date":"2012-06-18T23:31:10","date_gmt":"2012-06-19T03:31:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/?p=469"},"modified":"2012-06-18T23:31:10","modified_gmt":"2012-06-19T03:31:10","slug":"msnbc-misrepresents-romney-speech-invents-wawa-gaffe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2012\/06\/18\/msnbc-misrepresents-romney-speech-invents-wawa-gaffe\/","title":{"rendered":"MSNBC Misrepresents Romney Speech, Invents Wawa &#8216;Gaffe&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img data-recalc-dims=\"1\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/pixel.nymag.com\/imgs\/daily\/intel\/2012\/06\/18\/146437552.o.jpg\/a_190x190.jpg?w=525\"><\/p>\n<p>Today MSNBC aired footage of Mitt Romney marveling at the Wawa hoagie-ordering process during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, saying, &#8220;You press a little touchtone keypad \u00e2\u20ac\u201d you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier \u00e2\u20ac\u201d there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s your sandwich. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s amazing.&#8221; He&#8217;s so corny and out of touch! Except, the full three-minute clip shows that Romney was actually describing his Wawa outing as part of a metaphor about government bureaucracy. The guy may be rich, but he&#8217;s ordered a sandwich before.<\/p>\n<p>The gaffe has been gaining traction today, with &#8220;Wawa&#8221; trending on Twitter and Matt Bevens, a surrogate press coordinator for the Obama campaign, <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/mbevens\/status\/214782037930946561\">remarking<\/a>, &#8220;So out of touch he&#8217;s never used a gas station touchscreen.&#8221; Yet, in context, Romney was contrasting the simplicity of ordering a sandwich at Wawa with the difficulty a local optometrist had changing his address on government forms. He concluded, &#8220;People in the private sector have learned how to compete. It&#8217;s time to bring some competition to the federal government.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>On her show today Andrea Mitchell dubbed the incident Romney&#8217;s &#8220;super market scanner moment.&#8221; She&#8217;s more accurate than she realized. In 1992 George H.W. Bush was painted as out of touch after it was reported that he was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.snopes.com\/history\/american\/bushscan.asp\">&#8220;amazed&#8221; by the device<\/a> at a National Grocers Association convention. He actually wasn&#8217;t looking at the standard scanner found in most grocery stores at the time, but new technology that could weigh food and read torn bar codes.<\/p>\n<p>Wawa-gate is a textbook &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intel\/2012\/06\/taxonomy-of-gaffes.html\">Out-of-Context Gaffe<\/a>,&#8221; plus, even without the edited footage there was enough material for a story on Romney&#8217;s awkward attempt to embrace Pennsylvania&#8217;s local cuisine. He repeatedly referred to the chain as &#8220;Wawa&#8217;s,&#8221; not &#8220;Wawa,&#8221; and used the (unimpressive) touchscreen to order a <a href=\"http:\/\/philadelphia.grubstreet.com\/2012\/06\/romney-orders-a-sub-in-hoagie-country.html\">meatball hero<\/a> with pickles and sweet peppers rather than a classic hoagie.<\/p>\n<p>Read more posts by <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/author\/margaret%20hartmann\">Margaret Hartmann<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Filed Under:<br \/>\n          <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/news\/stuck-in-the-mittle\" title=\"Read all posts tagged stuck in the mittle\">stuck in the mittle<\/a><br \/>\n            <\/strong>,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/news\/mitt-romney\" title=\"Read all posts tagged mitt romney\">mitt romney<\/a><br \/>\n            ,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/news\/gaffes\" title=\"Read all posts tagged gaffes\">gaffes<\/a><br \/>\n            ,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/news\/wawa\" title=\"Read all posts tagged wawa\">wawa<\/a><br \/>\n            ,<a href=\"http:\/\/www.vulture.com\/news\/msnbc\" title=\"Read all posts tagged msnbc\">msnbc<\/a>\n            <\/p>\n<p>via Daily Intel <a href=\"http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intel\/2012\/06\/msnbc-misquotes-romney-invents-wawa-gaffe.html\">http:\/\/nymag.com\/daily\/intel\/2012\/06\/msnbc-misquotes-romney-invents-wawa-gaffe.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today MSNBC aired footage of Mitt Romney marveling at the Wawa hoagie-ordering process during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania, saying, &#8220;You press a little touchtone keypad \u00e2\u20ac\u201d you touch this, touch this, go pay the cashier \u00e2\u20ac\u201d there\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s your sandwich. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s amazing.&#8221; He&#8217;s so corny and out of touch! Except, the full three-minute clip shows &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/2012\/06\/18\/msnbc-misrepresents-romney-speech-invents-wawa-gaffe\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;MSNBC Misrepresents Romney Speech, Invents Wawa &#8216;Gaffe&#8217;&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[53,6,52],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-google-reader","tag-daily-intel","tag-ifttt","tag-margaret-hartmann"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2skW4-7z","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gabrielsnyder.com\/notes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}