But before bungling his latest Benghazi attack in the Long Island debate, there were at least four other major whiffs as Romney tried and tried again to demonstrate that he can be the leader of the US in a complex and challenging world.
That's a Major League whiff.
Early last week – before many major news outlets caught whiff of the scent – a few people set to work on a Wikipedia page now titled "2013 Egyptian coup d'état".
Some of the players, chiefly those who had never had a whiff of the major leagues, were in awe of Irabu nonetheless.
He discovered that the women were most sexually attracted to the whiff of men whose "major histocompatibility complex" genes were most dissimilar to their own.
At Page-Turner, Ian Crouch chronicled the American literary scene's transition from "overlooked backwater" to major international player, and unearthed the whiff of "Old World snobbery" among the Booker isolationists.
If Samsung gets a faint whiff of any other major tech company building something, it basically has to build one, too, with the aim of delivering it first, and cheaper, but with a healthy side of promoting its other mobile products.
And rising from the editorial battlefield was the ozone whiff of uncertainty about what some major editorial appointments will bring.
For the Books Whiff: The Brewers became the first team in major league history to collect more strikeouts (1,399) than base hits (1,378).
Yet some self-serving attempts by Toyota's rivals to rewrite history — as though Toyota's first major quality hiccup erased decades of proven reliability and consumer trust — carried a whiff of wishful thinking.
