Well, This Is What I Think

Lest we misunderestimate him, using the marvellous Bushism, Republican White House hopeful Mitt Romney has meticulously spelled out his vision for a better America while on the campaign trail this year. But in his new mobile app? Not so much.

The “With Mitt” application for the iPhone allows users to express support for the recently anointed Republican flag bearer by personalising a photo with an overlaid Romney slogan. Trouble is, one of the slogans had a howler of a spelling mistake: “A Better Amercia.”

Amercia? Really?

Members of the proofreading public recently made the discovery and it went viral on Twitter late on Tuesday in the US, with people mockingly tweeting photos showing the “Amercia” message.

“Some poor app designer is getting strapped in a cage on the top of a car and driven across country tonight. #amercia,” one user tweeted, in a reference to Romney’s hard-to-live-down decision years ago to strap the family dog in its carrier on the roof of the car during a vacation.

Early on Wednesday, the app, promoted by official campaign website mittromney.com, had yet to be corrected, and new downloads contained the spelling error.

“Mistakes happen,” Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul said on MSNBC.

“I don’t think any voter cares about a typo at the end of the day,” she said, adding that an update had been sent to Apple. Hours later, the company’s app store was offering an updated version with the embarrassing mistake corrected.

The “With Mitt” download page offered version 1.0.1 which it said makes “bug fixes” to the app, but the change of note was the removal of the offending phrase.

The GOP’s 2012 campaign has had its share of embarrassing spelling gaffes.

Former Utah governor Jon Huntsman’s presidential bid got off to a rocky start when his team handed out press passes at the inaugural campaign event for “John Huntsman”, unnecessarily inserting an H into his first name. But much more embarrassingly, in March, red-faced aides to former senator Rick Santorum were forced to resend a corrected public schedule to reporters after they inadvertently mailed out “Santorum’s Pubic Schedule”.

As someone who has worked in communications for more than 25 years, I simply cannot understand how such mistakes happen. On the other hand, I did once run a double page spread for a client with the 70 point headline Oustanding Value. Interestingly it was a week before anyone noticed. So perhaps those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Luckily, the internet didn’t really exist back then.

So from here on in, Democrats can presumably be relied upon to gleefully murmur behind their hands that the problem with Romney isn’t that he’s a Mormon, more that he’s a moron … well, spelling wise, at least.

(Thanks to the Sydney Morning Herald and others)

Related articles

• A Better Amercia: Romney App Typo Goes Viral (storify.com)
• Mitt Romney’s iPhone App Exhorts Users to Believe in a Better ‘Amercia’ (observer.com)
• This one is really good: RECOMMENDED, very funny. Pass notes, No 3,184: Amercia (guardian.co.uk)