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Hey, look, a guy called Mitt Romney on the cover of Newsweek!

Hmmm...there's no such thing as bad publicity, right?

A couple of thoughts about this. For one thing, a guy called Mitt Romney may not exactly ooze testosterone when he tries to pretend to like NASCAR or when he boasts about his prancing horse to Sean Hannity, but it never occurred to me that his problem (of the many) is that he's a wimp. The knock on his tenure at Bain Capital is that he was ruthless in pursuing profit over people...revolting, but not wimpy.

Also, I may be a contrarian on this, but I think something like this Newsweek cover helps Romney more than it hurts him. I felt the same way this weekend when there was so much clucking on Twitter and in certain corners of the media about Romney's verbal gaffes in the UK. It was a lot of fun and a lot of laughs -- for a bunch o' liberals who weren't voting for Romney in a million years.

I do indeed think the gaffes were a low point for diplomacy and another clue that Romney would be a terrible (if not wimpy) president. But the small handful of voters who are actually are undecided are more likely to vote on whether or not they or their close relatives have a job this fall, don't you think?

Meanwhile, headlines like "the wimp factor" will rally conservatives who already think the liberal media is against them. The Newsweek cover is a tribute to one of its most famous covers of all time, in 1987, featuring George H.W. Bush.

Remind me again how that turned out.