Mitt Romney met with top British political leaders today,
kicking off his first official appearances in a week-long international trip
designed to demonstrate his foreign-policy credentials to American voters.
The Republican presidential candidate stressed the
importance of the longtime transatlantic alliance in morning appointments with
British Prime Minister David
Cameron and one of his predecessors, Tony Blair.
He’s also scheduled to meet with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband,
the leader of the opposition Labour Party, and Chancellor of the Exchequer
George Osborne.
“We have a very special relationship between the United
States and Great Britain,” Romney said in an interview with NBC’s “Nightly
News” yesterday. “It goes back to our very beginnings -- cultural and
historical.”
London, where the Olympic Games begin tomorrow, is the first
leg of a three-country trip intended to show voters at home that the former
Massachusetts governor, who has little diplomatic experience, would be a
capable commander-in-chief.
He exchanged pleasantries with Blair about the Olympics this
morning in the former prime minister’s office. Romney’s wife, Ann, has a horse
representing the U.S. in dressage.
“My wife has a horse competing in the equestrian,” he said.
“She’s very pleased to be a part of it.”
Bankers’ Fundraiser
Romney, the former head of the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter
Olympics, plans to see the opening ceremonies of the games and attend at least
one competition. Tonight, he’s holding a fundraiser at the Mandarin Oriental
Hyde Park hotel with American bankers, some of whose firms are under
investigation in connection with the Libor rate-fixing scandal.
It’s common for American candidates to visit the U.K., an
important U.S. ally, during their presidential campaigns. President Barack
Obama stopped over shortly before formally accepting his party’s presidential
nomination in 2008. Romney met with British officials during a July 2011 trip
to London.
This time the former private-equity executive arrives in the
midst of a recession in Britain and a European debt crisis.
The U.K. economy shrank the most since 2009 in the second
quarter and more than economists forecast, increasing pressure on Cameron to
abandon Britain’s biggest austerity program since World War II. Gross domestic
product fell 0.7 percent from the first quarter, when it dropped 0.3 percent,
the Office for National Statistics said in London yesterday.
Britain’s government has blamed the euro-area turmoil for
pushing the country into the first double-dip recession since the 1970s.
‘Anglo-Saxon’
Romney’s trip also got off to a rocky start. Yesterday, the
Daily Telegraph newspaper quoted an unnamed adviser as saying Romney thought
the U.S.-British relationship is special because of a shared “Anglo-Saxon”
heritage that Obama does not appreciate.
Romney distanced himself from the comment, saying he could
not identify the adviser and disagreed with the criticism.
“You have a lot of people that offer advice, so I’m not sure
who this person is,” he told NBC’s Nightly News.
Still, Vice President Joe Biden and top Obama campaign aides
pounced on the report. “The comments reported this morning are a disturbing
start to a trip designed to demonstrate Gov. Romney’s readiness to represent
the United States on the world’s stage,” Biden said in a statement.
Tonight, Romney plans to tap into his network of global
business contacts to raise money at two fundraisers organized by executives
from banks and other financial institutions.
Host List
Co-hosts for the events include Patrick Durkin, a
Washington-based lobbyist for Barclays Plc (BARC); Eric Varvel, the chief
executive officer of Credit Suisse (CSGN) Group AG’s investment bank; Dwight
Poler, a managing director at Bain Capital Europe; Raj Bhattacharyya, a
managing director at Deutsche Bank AG; and Whitfield Hines, a managing director
at HSBC Holdings Plc. (HSBA)
The fundraisers were set to be co-hosted by former Barclays
CEO Robert Diamond, who resigned on July 3 amid political pressure the
London-based bank faced after it admitted to rigging global interest rates. He dropped
his fundraising role soon after.
Later this week, Romney will travel to Israel and Poland for
meetings with local leaders, policy speeches and visits to historical sights. (http://www.bloomberg.com)
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