Steve Kornacki issues a once-legitimate but now-receding caveat:
[F]or all of the attention Romney’s trip has attracted, most voters still aren’t paying attention – and for those who are, the story will be overtaken by something else next week, and something else the week after, and so on, until it’s a distant (at best) memory.
By "something else" Kornacki means something non-gaffish. A new jobs report, a fresh GDP, a euro meltdown, an Iranian crisis, "something" like that, something that will overwhelm Mitt Romney's impressively accumulated record of jawdropping blunders.
Early on, I feared that as the case. He's just warming up, I thought, it's been four years, he's rusty, he'll get better. But at some indefinite, indistinct, vague and shadowy point during the GOP primary season it became thunderingly clear that Mitt Romney is a man of boundless, inevitable oafishness: he stumbled from his wife's "couple of Cadillacs" to right-heighted trees to human corporations to $10,000 bets to not hiring illegals (when politically inconvenient) to being "[un]sure about these cookies."
My guess? We'll actually witness an exponential pickup in the pace of Romney's gaffes, for the simple reason that the more self-conscious he becomes in tapping them down, the more aggressively they'll pop up. I don't know why. It's just human nature for the most intense self-intentions to go preposterously awry. And Mitt Romney's got 'em bad.