Take my wife—please.

The party of family values seems to having problems valuing the family sport:

It’s a big, exciting experience for my wife. I have to tell you, this is Ann’s sport. I’m not even sure which day the sport goes on. She will get the chance to see it, I will not be watching the event. I hope her horse does well.

Of all the many problems with this statement, the least of them is Romney’s use of a definitive article before the word “sport.” Not that suggesting you say things like “Darling, I’ll be out performing the sport this morning” doesn’t make you sound like a caricature of a half-blind aristocrat using a mallet at crutch as he bumbles toward some wickets, mind you. Because that’s a problem. But the real problem is that it demonstrates that Romney’s willing to disavow anyone who might impede his candidacy. That he’s not sure “which day the sport goes on” isn’t an indictment of him as a candidate—it’s an indictment of him as a husband. Admittedly, I only have one wife, so I’m sure if I had—what I mean is that as someone who also only has one wife, I can’t imagine a situation in which I’d be blasé about her representing America in the Olympics, especially when I was campaigning to become the President of America.

I can only assume he’s courting the calloused husband vote here, because I can’t think of who else he’d be trying to impress with this brilliant bit of campaign rhetoric.  (Which assumes this statement is intentional, being that this is part of his charm offensive and all—but of course it isn’t. This is just garden-variety faux-machismo that Romney’s using to pander to conservatives who’d never heard the word “dressage” before but immediately associated it with vaginas.)