Let the (general) games begin!

As Santorum goes back to being a frothy mixture of semen, feces, and lubricant, Political Wire gives us a look at that folksy master of charm, Mitt Romney:

A mole gives Gawker video of Mitt Romney and Sean Hannity bantering before the taping of a Fox News interview in February.

"Of note: Romney professes his and his wife Ann's well-known love of horseriding, praising the qualities of the 'Austrian Warmbloods' that his wife rides -- they are 'dressage' horses, he notes -- while maintaining his own preference for the 'smoother gait' of his own 'Missouri foxtrotter.' Now there's nothing wrong with Mitt and his wife loving horseback riding. But remember this video next time Romney attacks Obama for golfing. The inherent elitism and snootiness of golf is NOTHING compared to competitive horseback riding. And I think Mitt loses points with the GOP base for his correct pronunciation of dressage. To GOP-voter ears it sounds not only gay, but even worse, French."

BuzzFeed isolates the part where Romney tries to do an impression of a gay man asking for a pink tie.

Though as Walter Kirn points out, empathy ain't Obama's strength, either:

Thanks perhaps to his peripatetic childhood and his absent father, Obama seems both hungry for crowd approval and limited in his ability to reach out to others. He's a bright, lonely boy who needs a lot from us but can't always return the favor, and he really only expresses public emotion when talking about Michelle, Malia, Sasha, or March Madness. The mythically cool and diffident figure whose blood supply goes mostly to his forebrain to oxygenate and nourish his IQ does make Romney, at moments, seem positively small-town, like a well-dressed Gomer Pyle on an especially great hair day. And Obama is also slightly better than Romney at dumbing himself down for humble occasions (he talks hoops more convincingly than Romney talks hunting and he bothers to drop his Gs when touring the heartland, a trick that is woefully willed-seeming and obvious although he appears to think he does it masterfully, the same way he thinks he does everything masterfully). But in the end he's just brittle where Romney's leaden, and twisty-quick where Romney's straight and plodding. Neither man shares your burdens; they both have the springy, tensile, perfect postures of students who like to get their hands up fast, expect to be called on, always are, and never fail to offer the right answer, or at least a convincing rationale for how their wrong answer was properly arrived at given the flawed information they had to work with.

I suppose the "rather have a beer with ______" is foreclosed by Romney's being a Mormon abstainer from such things. Of course, Dubya was supposedly on the wagon, and he still won that test.