We’ve been stupefied at the public relations disaster that has been Mitt Romney’s European vacation.
Especially amazing is that the candidate would want to draw attention to his role in the 2002 Winter Olympics, particularly in light of his effort to disavow the impact of infrastructure and public works in American business success (and if you don’t think it makes a difference, just ask a Somalian).
Romney used his role as CEO of the 2002 games, held in Mormon world headquarters, aka Salt Lake City, Utah, to jump-start his successful bid for governor of Massachusetts. But as this article in the Washington Examiner notes, the event wasn’t exactly a one-man show.
In Romney’s book “Turnaround: Crisis, Leadership and the Olympic Games,” Romney describes in a chapter entitled “Funds from the Feds” how he lobbied Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., for funding, saying he “would need hundreds of millions of dollars worth of federal support from a long list of departments.”
“No matter how well we did cutting costs and raising revenue, we couldn’t have games without the support of the federal government,” Romney wrote.
Of course, Romney published the book in 2004, and in Mitt years — in which time expands and positions shift, usually to their opposite — that’s a lifetime ago.
[Romney] subsequently registered as a lobbyist for the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and secured $342 million in direct funding from the federal government and another $1.1 billion in indirect financing from Washington…
McCain later called the Olympics “an incredible pork-barrel project for Salt Lake City and its environs.”
