Mitt Romney stumbles out of the gate on world trip. Will US voters care? (+video)

While that may be true, Mr. Henriksen says such pre-election overseas trips have nevertheless become “de rigueur” for presidential candidates to prove their leadership mettle. Then-Senator Obama’s 2008 overseas trip, which included a rock star’s reception at a speech in Berlin, “resonated” with the public and allowed some voters to “check the box and say, ‘OK, he can do it,’ ” Henriksen says.

The danger for candidates is not so much that the “tiny blips” themselves will matter at the ballot box, but that they will reinforce the negatives that are weighing a candidate down at home.

Thus the pesky nature of the “Anglo-Saxon” kerfuffle. The Telegraph said the quote was from an anonymous Romney aide, and Romney, disassociating himself from the term, noted that a lot of people call themselves “aides’ who in reality have no formal campaign role.

But still the term stuck. One reason is that its association with the Romney campaign played into the debate between the Romney and Obama camps over which side is more “out of touch” with mainstream America.

As Henriksen notes, “Anglo-Saxon” is by now an “old-fashioned sounding” term that defines an ever-smaller slice of the American pie. “People used to say WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] all the time, but America is just so different from what it was just a relatively few years ago,” he says.

Vice President Joe Biden knew an opportunity to drive home the “out of touch” point when he saw it, quickly blasting the anonymous comment as “beneath a presidential campaign.”

The Romney campaign, hoping to nip the controversy in the bud, said the proof that the dreaded quote would not have come from anyone of any stature in its stable of advisers was the very ethnic and cultural variety of the advisory corps.

That said, the word was out that the whole “Anglo-Saxon” tempest had the Romney camp taking extra care to ensure that another potential danger in the “out of touch” minefield – Ann Romney’s dressage horse, set to prance in the London Olympics – does not mar the candidate’s trip.

Mrs. Romney has spoken compellingly about her horses and how they have helped her contend with her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis. But dressage horses are very expensive, and risk conjuring up allusions to the Romneys’ considerable wealth and rarefied living. The campaign has yet to live down comedian Stephen Colbert’s recent description of dressage as “Nascar with a velvet top hat.”

As Romney whisked around London and prepared for Friday’s Olympics opening ceremonies, the “Anglo-Saxon” brouhaha was a reminder that the campaign may downshift but does not stop just because the candidate is overseas.

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