Mitt Romney is a strange campaigner, what is up with him reciting patriotic lyrics. First off Romney is saying absolutely nothing specific, whether he is on Charlie Rose or Morning Joe or delivering one of his campaign stump speeches, he uses the word Free Enterprise twenty times but he never tells you one specific idea, War69.com will address this in later posts.

For now we are stumped by the robotic, ineffectual, and just plain weird campaign style of Mitt Romney. Who in the hell is writing his speeches? It is almost akin to Stephen Colbert running for President in a skit, it seems like Romney is acting the part of a comedian running for President. On the night he won the Iowa Caucus by 8 votes his speech was horrible. He didn’t even change the odd patriotic lyrics from his usual stump speech routine, did his speechwriters not prepare a voting night speech? He repeated everything, including the lame Iowa corn joke. Here is The NY Times covering his January 1, 2012 stump speech in Iowa:

“The president said he wants to fundamentally transform America,” Mr. Romney said on Wednesday in North Liberty. “I kind of like America. I’m not looking for it to be fundamentally transformed into something else. I don’t want it to become like Europe.”

He continued, “I want America to be more like America, if you will. I want the songs, that patriotism we have.” He then began quoting directly from his favorite verses of “America the Beautiful.”

But Mr. Romney is also using the patriotic songs to try to elevate his own political speeches — making them, in a way, more like Mr. Obama’s eloquent and inspiring rhetoric in the state four years ago. (Indeed, Mr. Obama became so famous for the soaring remarks he wrote himself that his rival Hillary Rodham Clinton, borrowing a line from former Gov. Mario Cuomo, remarked that you campaign in poetry, but govern in prose.)

And Mr. Romney does not just recite the lyrics — he annotates them, offering his interpretation of the meaning. “Most of the time when we sing a song, we don’t think much about the words,” he said. “But I’ve begun looking at these words and thinking about them.”

“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,” he said, is a reference to the country’s soldiers. (“Any veterans in this room here today?” he asked. “Thank you for your service.”)

And “O beautiful for patriot dream that sees beyond the years,” he continued, is an allusion to the nation’s founders. (The founding fathers, he said, “created something not just for their time, but that sees beyond the years.”)

Voters seem to be responding to Mr. Romney’s patriotic appeal. “For me, my father was killed in World War II, so those songs always tug at my heartstrings,” said Donald Good, 67, a dentist from Ames.

Mr. Romney’s performance has improved as well.

On Wednesday, when he first used the line about corn counting as an amber wave of grain, he was met with pin-drop silence. He tried it again at the next few events, to polite laughter. By Thursday night, at a rally in Ames, Mr. Romney had perfected his delivery.

”If corn qualifies as an amber wave of grain, we have it right here,” Mr. Romney said as the crowd applauded and cheered.

Mr. Romney exalted: “It does! It does!”

The whole scene reminded War69.com of the movie “Fletch” with Chevy Chase. In that movie Fletch tells the audience to salute the police officers in the audience, just as Romney directs the audience to do the same with veterans. Fletch ends by singing “The Star Spangled Banner”, just as Romney painfully recites and sings lyrics from patriotic songs including “America The Beautiful”.

Here are videos of the clip from Fletch and Romney’s Iowa speech: