Mitt Drops a Softball

Mitt 'The Gameshow Host' Romney has uttered the first genuinely stupid thing I've heard all season. Kevin Drum picks up the story:

Today's mandatory blogging is about Mitt Romney's declaration that his favorite novel is L. Ron Hubbard's Battlefield Earth, a bad science fiction book made into an even worse John Travolta vehicle a few years ago (Scott McLemee provides a precis here). Several people have suggested that Romney must be telling the truth about this since no one in his right mind would lie about liking this book, but I suspect something else: I suspect Romney just doesn't read much fiction and was stuck for an answer. His neurons fired away momentarily searching for something to say, and Battlefield Earth is what popped up.

Following Drum's meme:

Needless to say, I'm here to help. Sort of.... I promised to follow up with a selection of "safe, patriotic, audience friendly 'favorite books,'" but I never came through. So let's do it ourselves! Here are the original categories:

• Moderately intellectual choice, suitable for being interviewed by George Will
  

• Funny choice, suitable for being interviewed on MTV
  

• Multicultural choice, suitable for being interviewed by New York Times
  

• Populist choice, suitable for being interviewed by Parade
  

• Safely patriotic choice, suitable for being interviewed by Rush Limbaugh
  

• Thoughtful choice, suitable for being interviewed on PBS
  

• Anti-terrorism choice, suitable for being interviewed by Andrew Sullivan

These are actual favorite books of mine:

George Will: Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
NYTimes: Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
Parade: Timeline by Michael Crichton
Rush Limbaugh: Theodore Rex by Edmund Morris
PBS: Foucault's Pendulum, by Umberto Eco
Andrew Sullivan: The Bourne Ultimatum (just to see what he'd say), then The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright

What Drum doesn't get is that Romney is probably catering to people who read the 'Left Behind' series of Christian fiction in order to make bonds across Christian sects. But he couldn't come out and say so, but people who know, know.