Tag: Campaign 2012
You Decide: New Video Appears to Show Santorum Using the N-Word to Refer to Pres. Obama
Transcript:
RICK SANTORUM: We know the candidate Barack Obama, what he was like – the anti-war government nig… America was a source for division around the world, that what we were doing was wrong.
If You Liked Bush, You’ll Love Romney
A signal has apparently gone out among the Bush family and faithful: Line up behind Romney!
Recently, former Gov. Jeb Bush, former Pres. George H.W. Bush, and his wife, Barbara, publicly endorsed the Mormon. The admiration is mutual, according to Reuters, since Romney is relying on members of Pres. George W. Bush’s administration to advise him on national security and foreign policy.
If the rest of the Republican party hoped for more in the way of a candidate this year, the Bush folks couldn’t be happier.
Romney has named 24 “special advisers” in national security and foreign policy, 16 of whom served in diplomatic or political roles under Bush. They include Michael Chertoff, the former homeland security chief, and Dan Senor, who was an administration spokesman in Iraq.
On judicial issues, Romney is advised by at least three top veterans of Bush’s Justice Department.
Romney’s education advisers include Margaret Spellings, who was secretary of education under Bush and a chief advocate for No Child Left Behind….
Privately, they believe that…a Romney presidency could have a look much like Bush’s presidency.
Romney’s campaign is “a restoration of the Bush establishment,” said former Bush speechwriter Matt Lattimer, who is not supporting Romney. Bush loyalists “all want to be back in power again, and Romney’s the best bet.”
Let the Santorum Campaign Postmortems Begin
Sam Stein and Jason Cherkis at Huffington Post blame Rick Santorum’s failures in the 2012 Republican primaries on the fact that he learned nothing from the 18-point loss he suffered in his campaign for reelection to the Senate in 2006:
Interviews with more than a dozen former aides, adversaries, and close observers of the ‘06 contest, however, show that important lessons — about the need to stay on message, convey warmth to voters and appear less patronizing — haven’t been learned at all. The senator who stumbled so badly six years ago, many say, is the same candidate now locked in a hotly-contested race for the Republican presidential nomination: pugnacious and unscripted, talented at retail politics, but often his own worst enemy.
But this leaves out the fact that Rick Santorum never had a chance at becoming president because he is a narrow-minded jerk and a bully who is not intellectually or temperamentally suited for high office. It took Pennsylvania voters 12 years — the two terms he served in the Senate — to figure that out. A new Qunnipiac poll out yesterday finds that while Pres. Obama and Mitt Romney are virtually tied in Pennsylvania, 45 to 42 percent, the president beats native son Santorum, 48 to 41 percent.
And Then There’s the One About the Factory Closing
On the Mitt Romney Comedy Tour, er, presidential campaign, the candidate has earned a reputation for having a tin ear when it comes to what a rich white billionaire thinks is funny (firing people, acting like women he’s taking a photo with grab his ass, wearing mom jeans, etc.) and what average people who actually need a job think is funny.
Romney’s latest standup gig, er, campaign appearance, was in Wisconsin, where he told what he considered to be a real ripper:
Talking by conference call with thousands of Wisconsin voters Wednesday, Mitt Romney told them he had a humorous connection to their state.
But it didn’t take long for “funny anecdote” to become “campaign fodder.”
Romney’s story involved the time more than 50 years ago that his father, George, an American Motors executive, shut down a factory in Michigan and moved the work to Wisconsin.
“Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan, and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign,” explained Romney, who described a subsequent campaign parade in which the school band marching with his father knew how to play Wisconsin’s fight song, but not Michigan’s.
“Every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, On Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.
Romney will probably be telling jokes at a venue near you sometime between now and November. If you are a Republican, please laugh politely.
Why Jim DeMint – or a White Evangelical Southern Male Like Him – Will Be Romney’s VP Nominee
It is all but a dead cinch now that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for president this year, not because he accrued the delegates he needs — he hasn’t — but because the campaigns of his two closest rivals have imploded.
Newt Gingrich’s sugar daddy Sheldon Adelson, owner of the Venetian and Sands casinos in Las Vegas, recently announced he was pulling the plug on the Gingrich campaign. Gingrich is “at the end of his line,” Adelson said in informal remarks at a Jewish Federation of North America event in one of his casinos.
Rick Santorum inadvertently revealed that he knows his campaign is over — a revelation he has not shared with his donors or supporters — in an interview on Pat Robertson’s televangelical “news” network. Asked if he would be willing to be Romney’s running mate, Santorum said, “Of course. I mean, look. I would do in this race as I always say, this is the most important race in our country’s history. I’m going to do everything I can.”
Wrong answer. The correct answer would have been, “Fortunately, I’ll never have to make that decision, because I am going to be the nominee.” Thanks for playing.
The likelihood Romney would choose Santorum as his running mate is zilch — and not just because Santorum lost his last Senate race in Pennsylvania by double digits or because the Obama campaign would have a field day producing ads showing Romney’s running mate shaking an Etch-a-Sketch, describing Romney as “uniquely disqualified,” a “well-oiled weather vane,” “bland and boring” and a “bully.”
But that’s just one reason the Romney campaign won’t choose Santorum. The other reason is that Rick Santorum is a Catholic.
Romney: I Don’t Care About Millions of Uninsured Americans with Preexisting Conditions
Everybody knows that when Mitt Romney said, “I don’t care about poor people,” the quote was taken out of context. What he actually said was that he wasn’t concerned about the poor because he believed the government’s social safety net would take care of them. (It’s tempting to quibble with that — after all, his party is doing its best to shred that safety net. See the Paul Ryan budgets for this year and last, for example. But that’s another matter.)
On the “Jay Leno Show” on NBC last night, Romney made a similar statement. about uninsured Americans who have preexisting conditions this time — and this time his apathy about their fates is clear, even when read in context:
Little Ricky Is Having a Meltdown
It was bad enough that Rick Santorum borrowed a page from Keith Olbermann’s play book when he stood before a crowd in Racine, Wis. and said Mitt Romney is “the worst Republican in the country to put up against Barack Obama.”
No, Santorum dug himself in a little deeper when a New York Times reporter asked him if that’s really what he meant to say.
Santorum accused the Times’ Jeff Zeleny of distorting his words following a question from the reporter Sunday night.
Zeleny asked Santorum if he thinks Mitt Romney is the “worst Republican in the country to run against Obama,” something he said while campaigning in Wisconsin.
In response, Santorum said “I didn’t say that. You guys are distorting what I’m saying … Quit distorting my words. It’s bullshit.
Obviously the bullshit was all on Santorum’s side as that was quite clearly what he said, with no distortion involved in understanding it.
New Insight Into the Sad Story of Shamus Romney
What’s been left out of most versions of the Mitt Romney-dog-on-the-car-roof story is what an anal control freak Romney apparently is. The story starts about 1:30…
One-Word Impressions of the GOP Candidates
Remember the old word-association game where I would say a word and you would say the first word that came to mind? Pew Research did much the same thing in a new poll that elicited “quick, off-the-cuff public impressions” of the GOP presidential candidates.
Predictably, they are mostly unflattering:
For Mitt Romney, the overall number of people citing money or wealth has soared since late last year, with mentions of his religion way down. His top five in the new poll are “no,” “rich,” “good,” “Mormon” and “moderate.”
The top five for Rick Santorum: “conservative,” “no,” “good,” “OK,” and “crazy.”
For Newt Gingrich: “old,” “no,” “idiot,” “untrustworthy” and “dislike.”
