#USelections2012: A bad spell for Romney?

This Week: Mitt Romney fails the spelling bee, Obama faces a troubling job report, Donald Trump vs. Wolf Blitzer.

Mitt Romney Super Tuesday glum 390 (photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder )
Mitt Romney Super Tuesday glum 390
(photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder )
It doesn’t matter if you have the right policies, the right message, the right look, the right ideas or even the right historical moment if you can’t get the spelling right.
That’s what Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney discovered this past week when his campaign released a new iPhone app that allows users to superimpose “I’m with Mitt” banners on their own photos. Among them, a banner with the now-classic slogan: “A Better Amercia.”
Nearly 32,000 tweeters took notice, sending the misspelled term up Twitter’s trending list, according to Topsy.com.
Tweet of the Week:

Running with the app’s intended usage, an inevitable tumblr blog featuring fun uses of the typo quickly emerged.

Though the Romney Campaign wished it could “Etch-a-Sketch” its way out of the embarrassing self-promotion, their troubles didn’t end there. A few days later, it was besieged by spelling trouble again when it decided to offer up a “Sneak Peak” of its next television ad on Facebook:

While the campaign was befuddled by mistaken syntax errors, it also took on some controversy willingly. Romney embraced the support of one Donald Trump, despite his reluctance to let go of the “birther” conspiracy theory that US President Barack Obama was, in fact, born in Kenya. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer (formerly of Jerusalem Post fame) took Trump to task for his “ridiculous” position, and their heated debate became a viral Internet hit.

Viral Video of the Week:
While one would guess that Obama would be basking in the glow of these gaffes, the Democrat faced his own problems this week. The most recent jobs report showed slow growth, and pushed unemployment back up to 8.2 percent.
The simple truth remains: the election will be decided on jobs. Despite his ability to pull massive star power to his campaign, hosting campaign fundraising events with the likes of Sarah Jessica Parker and Vogue editor Anna Wintour, BuzzFeed reported that 88% of the people who donated to Obama in 2008 did not contribute to him this election cycle.
With polls running neck and neck, it looks like Mitt Romney is not the only one suffering a bad spell.
#USelections2012 offers weekly insight into the US Presidential election through a social media lens, tracking candidates as they try to reach 270 electoral votes in 140 characters or less.

The writer is a Breaking News editor and blogger at The Jerusalem Post. Read his blog ‘The Bottom Line’ here.