Tag: Campaign 2012

Romney’s Blunders Keep On Coming, And Yet Coverage of His Campaign Has Become More Positive and His Poll Numbers Have Improved

Jon Ponder

“Everything changes,” Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom famously said on CNN in March. “It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.”

Fehrnstrom’s gaffe resonated because it fed into the public’s perception that Mitt Romney is a flip-flopper who changes his views to match those of whatever constituency he’s trying to woo. But Ferhnstrom was actually referring to the pivot, a routine campaign dynamic in which candidates who win primaries retool their messaging to appeal to moderate swing voters whose votes usually decide elections.

It got lost in the controversy over Fehrnstrom’s Etch A Sketch gaffe but candidates, especially presidential candidates, cannot execute the pivot on their own. What Ferhnstrom and the reporters covering his gaffe knew was that Romney would have help erasing his primary bungles from the very reporters who were tittering over Ferhnstrom’s unintentional truth-telling.

But why could Romney and Ferhnstrom feel they could rely on supposedly objective reporters to help them rewrite the history of the 2012 Republican primary? […]

Santorum’s Non-Endorsement Endorsement of Romney

Jon Ponder

Email is insufficient for some things — like breaking up a romance, quitting a job and this:

Rick Santroum sent an email to his supporters on Monday night announcing that he would back Mitt Romeny for the presidency and that everyone needs to support “our nominee” to defeat Barack Obama. In a long explanation, which is also posted on his website, Santorum says that he spoke to Romney last week and received assurances that “family and its foundational role in America’s economic success” are also important to the former governor, too. He also says that he’s “comfortable” with Romney’s foreign policy positions and that he’s convinced Romney will repeal Obamacare if elected, so don’t worry about all that stuff I said about him being a terrible candidate…

It’s slightly telling that Santorum chose to make the endorsement in writing, rather than in person, as most failed politicians do. There may be a time in the not-too-distant future where the two rivals publicly make amends, but doing it in this way allows Santorum to stand behind the party while keeping Romney honest.

Mitt Romney – Mormon Polygamy and Hidden Mormon Temple Records

Helen Radkey

(Willard) Mitt Romney—2012 Republican presidential candidate, a lifelong Mormon who boasts of having one wife, defines marriage as between “one man and one woman.”

Miles Romney, a great-great-grandfather of Mitt Romney, is in the process of being “sealed” to a 14th spouse.

Mitt Romney has publicly stated he follows the faith of his fathers—but he distances himself from the polygamous lifestyle that was freely chosen on an eternal note by many of his Mormon forefathers. According to Mormon records, polygamous unions galore can be found on the paternal lines—and one maternal line—of Romney’s direct ancestry.

Mitt Romney has openly condemned polygamy. During a “Sixty Minutes” interview with Mike Wallace in 2007, Romney said he couldn’t imagine anything more “awful” than polygamy, and was quick to insist The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS) outlawed the practice over a century ago. As a devout Mormon, Romney must accept Mormon founder, Joseph Smith, as a prophet of God. It should be questioned why Mitt Romney is so critical of a foundational Mormon practice that was introduced by Smith.

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Hate Group Claims Victory in Forcing Out Romney’s Gay Spokesman: ‘Romney Will Do the Right Thing If It’s Politically Expedient’

Jon Ponder

Grenell
Grenell
Was Richard Grenell, Romney’s recently hired, openly gay spokesman on international relations, fired or did he really resign on his own volition, as the campaign claims? Charles Pierce at Esquire believes it was the former, because, after all, Romney has said he enjoys firing people:

It’s remarkable, this shitcanning of Richard Grenell as foreign-policy spokescritter for the Romneybot 2.0. Remarkable still for its being handled with such notable dispatch. First, you hire on the former mouthpiece for authoritarian nutbag John Bolton to establish further your neo-conservative foreign-policy gravitas. It turns out the guy is openly gay, so bonus! (Remember, all you wavering and otherwise vacant “independent” voters: Once, I was going to be a gayer senator than Teddy Kennedy. Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.) Then, of course, the guy turns out to be just as crackers as his former boss — Bad-mouthing the lovely Callista Gingrich? Calumnizing kindly Doc Maddow? My seconds will call on yours, sir! — and, because he’s gay, the megachurches scramble the flying monkeys into the air and, within two weeks, Grenell is as fired as an Ampad worker.

Andrew Sullivan, who has insight into the gay conservative movement, believes Grenell resigned because Romney refused to come to his defense after Bryan Fisher, a hate group apparatchik, accused Grenell — who is in a committed relationship and, counter to his party, advocates marriage equality — of probably engaging in “random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters” (because, you know, heterosexuals, especially anti-gay evangelical leaders, are never promiscuous), a factor that, Fisher says becomes “a significant issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.” (Talk about exhuming McCarthy!)

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WWMD: What Would Mitt Romney Do… If He Were Someone Else?

Trish
manning
Romney: 'I would have done that'

Mitt Romney has famously said that “of course” he would have made the same decisions that led to the death of Osama bin Laden as Pres. Obama did. Obama, we will recall, elected to launch a Navy Seals attack without tipping off the Pakistani government because he had good intelligence on bin Laden’s whereabouts and no reason to trust the Pakistanis. Had the plan gone wrong, “of course,” we imagine Romney would have found much to fault.

We also know that in 2007, when he was running for president last, Romney echoed the sentiments of Pres. George W. Bush, who said he didn’t give a rat’s ass if we ever found bin Laden. Romney put it this way: “It’s not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.”

Since Romney now says if he were president, he would have done exactly what Pres. Obama did, I think it’s a good time to list some of the other things that Romney would have done if he were the person who did them, which he is not.

New Republican Ad Just as Bad as the 2008 Version

Trish

The folks who tried to bring you John McCain apparently have learned nada in four years. They dusted off the “celebrity president” jibe that helped lose in 2008 to help lose again in 2012. See if this rings a bell:

What really bothers Republicans: Pres. Obama, a black man, is president. And he’s acting all black cool, like he’s not even ashamed of being black.

Did you catch that? Gas prices were soaring when George W. Bush was president. I thought that was all Obama’s fault. But more on that later.

Now take a look at the updated ad, which replaces the booming sound effects, foreboding music, and the frightened female narrator with a catchier tune and the guy from the super monster truck event going, “Oh yeah.”

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You, Too, Can Predict the Election Outcome

Buck Banks

Political scientists believe you can get a pretty good prediction for a presidential candidate’s election chances based on just three pieces of data.

According to Ezra Klein of the Washington Post:

The final model uses just three pieces of information that have been found to be particularly predictive: economic growth in the year of the election, as measured by the change in gross domestic product during the first three quarters; the president’s approval rating in June; and whether one of the candidates is the incumbent.

That may seem a bit thin. But it calls 12 of the past 16 elections right. The average error in its prediction of the two-party vote share is less than three percentage points.

I used the new economic figures released yesterday (2.3%) and Obama’s latest approval rating from Gallup (50%), and the thing calculated that the incumbent wins 89.5 percent of the time when the economy is growing a 2.2 percent and his approval rating is 50 percent.

So go here, fiddle around with the data and start predicting.

GOP Hate Group Leader: Romney Spokesman Is Gay, Therefore a Slut, Which Makes Him a Security Risk

Jon Ponder

Bryan Fisher, the Republican Party-aligned hate group leader who is an influential voice among members of Mitt Romney’s teavangelical base continued his attacks yesterday on Richard Grenell, the openly gay Republican whom Romney named as his spokesman on international relations:

“Homosexuals are about short-lived relationships and frequent anonymous sexual encounters,” he said on his radio program. “This is very common in the homosexual community. Now whether Grenell indulges in that, I don’t know.”

Fischer said that although Grenell had been in a long-term relationship, he suspected that the relationship was not monogamous.

“There are some homosexuals who will admit — this is not coming from the right-wing, this is homosexuals themselves in surveys — that they have had 500 to as many as 1000 sexual partners over the course of a lifetime,” he continued.

“This is endemic the homosexual community, these random, frequent, and anonymous sexual encounters and that becomes a significant issue when we’re talking about appointing somebody to a post as sensitive as a spokesman for national security and foreign policy.”

Dogs Against Romney Founder: ‘If Obama Said the Dog Enjoyed Being Eaten, Romney Would Have an Argument’

Jon Ponder

I viewed the push-back as a desperate move to try to blunt the impact the dog-on-roof story is having on Romney. No one holds Obama accountable for what was fed to him by his parents as a 6-year-old in Indonesia. If Obama had chosen to eat dog as an adult, in America, and told everyone the dog enjoyed being eaten, Romney would have an argument.

– Scott Crider, founder of Dogs Against Romney, when asked why he thought Romney supporters were pushing the story that Obama was fed dog meat as a child.