rgrikki92 Romney in panic mode Way ahead of schedule, the finger-pointing has already begun in Romneyland By Alex Seitz-Wald (Credit: AP/Evan Vucci) The Romney campaign, it seems fair to conclude, is in panic mode and maybe already convinced they’ve lost. Today brings stories in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Politico about the campaign “abruptly switching strategy” and making “a painful course correction” — never a good sign when you’re just 50 days away from Election Day. The campaign has good reason to panic, as a growing gap in polls have led most pundits to conclude the race is all but over. Even the usually faithful Erick Erickson lamented today, “Contra Dick Morris, Mitt Romney is not winning this election.” The Republican National Convention gave the Romney campaign one of its final shots at changing direction, but the candidate was upstaged by an empty chair. Now, the only thing that can save Romney is a calamitous, unforeseen turn of events or an Obama misstep, but when both happened last week — Obama flubbed the status of U.S. relations with Egypt as the situation in the Middle East deteriorated — Romney had already so discredited himself on the issue that his campaign didn’t even attempt to exploit the blunder. Now desperate for a change, the campaign is making a big one. Since Romney locked up the nomination in the spring, his guiding principle has been to focus on how bad Obama is, and to talk about nothing but the economy (in a bit unfortunate timing, an adviser called foreign policy a “shiny object” distraction just days before the Middle East protests broke out). But now the campaign is throwing all that out the window. “No one in Boston thinks this can only be about the economy anymore…we have to bring more to the table,” a top aide told BuzzFeed. Romney will now present his own positive vision and offer more detailed policy prescriptions where he had been vague in the past, and make a broader push “on every front,” beyond just the economy, as chief strategist Stuart Stevens told Politico. If you think suddenly trying to advance on “every front” with less than two months to go may be a sign of an unhealthy campaign, you’re not alone. In fact, you’d have lots of company from within the Romney campaign, according to a separate Politico story co-authored by its two standard-bearers, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei. That the story even exists is the clearest sign that not only the pundits, but also many in Team Romney, seem to think they’ve already lost. The story, a detailed exposition of infighting and finger pointing within the campaign — most of it directed at Stevens — is the kind of thing you expect to read after Romney loses and aides try to pass the blame and save themselves. It features phrases like “utterly failed,” includes a no-so-subtle implication that Stevens has become psychologically unhinged, with candid quotes about him like this, from an unnamed staffer: “The campaign is filled with people who spend a lot of their time either avoiding him or resisting him.” To understand why the story is such a bad harbinger for the campaign, you need to understand how political campaigns work at the top levels. Unlike the Summer Campy, Kool-aid drinking junior staffers, the top brass of campaigns is mostly made up of professional political consultants that move from campaign to campaign over their career and whose reputations, and thus employability, rise and fall with the very public success or failings of the candidates for whom they work. When a candidate starts to lose, there’s a point where the work-a-day operatives stop believing in their boss and start to worry more about their own future employment. In 2008, this point came sometime in late October as McCain advisers began leaking sharply negative comments about VP nominee Sarah Palin to the press, including Politico’s Mike Allen. Palin was “whack job,” Allen quoted a McCain aide saying on Oct. 28, while CNN quoted another aide calling Palin a “diva.” Soon, as it became inevitable that Obama would likely win, the McCain campaign became a a black market of Palin slams, as advisers unloaded on the vice presidential nominee, hoping to scapegoat her for McCain’s loss. That was a week before the election. Now it seems Stu Stevens is the new Sarah Palin, and we’re ahead of schedule on sacrificial blood letting.
By Alex Seitz-Wald
(Credit: AP/Evan Vucci)
The Romney campaign, it seems fair to conclude, is in panic mode and maybe already convinced they’ve lost. Today brings stories in the New York Times, BuzzFeed, and Politico about the campaign “abruptly switching strategy” and making “a painful course correction” — never a good sign when you’re just 50 days away from Election Day.
The campaign has good reason to panic, as a growing gap in polls have led most pundits to conclude the race is all but over. Even the usually faithful Erick Erickson lamented today, “Contra Dick Morris, Mitt Romney is not winning this election.” The Republican National Convention gave the Romney campaign one of its final shots at changing direction, but the candidate was upstaged by an empty chair. Now, the only thing that can save Romney is a calamitous, unforeseen turn of events or an Obama misstep, but when both happened last week — Obama flubbed the status of U.S. relations with Egypt as the situation in the Middle East deteriorated — Romney had already so discredited himself on the issue that his campaign didn’t even attempt to exploit the blunder.
Now desperate for a change, the campaign is making a big one. Since Romney locked up the nomination in the spring, his guiding principle has been to focus on how bad Obama is, and to talk about nothing but the economy (in a bit unfortunate timing, an adviser called foreign policy a “shiny object” distraction just days before the Middle East protests broke out). But now the campaign is throwing all that out the window.
“No one in Boston thinks this can only be about the economy anymore…we have to bring more to the table,” a top aide told BuzzFeed. Romney will now present his own positive vision and offer more detailed policy prescriptions where he had been vague in the past, and make a broader push “on every front,” beyond just the economy, as chief strategist Stuart Stevens told Politico.
If you think suddenly trying to advance on “every front” with less than two months to go may be a sign of an unhealthy campaign, you’re not alone. In fact, you’d have lots of company from within the Romney campaign, according to a separate Politico story co-authored by its two standard-bearers, Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei. That the story even exists is the clearest sign that not only the pundits, but also many in Team Romney, seem to think they’ve already lost. The story, a detailed exposition of infighting and finger pointing within the campaign — most of it directed at Stevens — is the kind of thing you expect to read after Romney loses and aides try to pass the blame and save themselves. It features phrases like “utterly failed,” includes a no-so-subtle implication that Stevens has become psychologically unhinged, with candid quotes about him like this, from an unnamed staffer: “The campaign is filled with people who spend a lot of their time either avoiding him or resisting him.”
To understand why the story is such a bad harbinger for the campaign, you need to understand how political campaigns work at the top levels. Unlike the Summer Campy, Kool-aid drinking junior staffers, the top brass of campaigns is mostly made up of professional political consultants that move from campaign to campaign over their career and whose reputations, and thus employability, rise and fall with the very public success or failings of the candidates for whom they work. When a candidate starts to lose, there’s a point where the work-a-day operatives stop believing in their boss and start to worry more about their own future employment.
In 2008, this point came sometime in late October as McCain advisers began leaking sharply negative comments about VP nominee Sarah Palin to the press, including Politico’s Mike Allen. Palin was “whack job,” Allen quoted a McCain aide saying on Oct. 28, while CNN quoted another aide calling Palin a “diva.” Soon, as it became inevitable that Obama would likely win, the McCain campaign became a a black market of Palin slams, as advisers unloaded on the vice presidential nominee, hoping to scapegoat her for McCain’s loss. That was a week before the election. Now it seems Stu Stevens is the new Sarah Palin, and we’re ahead of schedule on sacrificial blood letting.
Romney Takes Heat for ‘Lame’ Campaign
Mitt Romney’s entire speech to the Republican National Convention was scrapped just eight days before he was due to give it and two new speechwriters were brought in to produce another one, it is claimed.
But even their effort ended up in the trash as Romney and his campaign adviser Stuart Stevens ended up “cobbling together” the final version that the GOP candidate gave in Tampa on Aug. 30, Politico reports.
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That speech was put together so hastily that it failed to include any salute to U.S. troops or even a mention of the ongoing war in Afghanistan.
And Romney’s day was made even worse when convention organizers allowed Clint Eastwood to decide at the last minute to take a chair with him on stage for his speech immediately before the candidate’s. The two-time Oscar-winner’s rambling address garnered far more headlines than Romney’s and subsequent polling found most people thought it was the highlight of the night.
Stevens did not deny the report. In an interview with Politico, he said, “The governor writes his speeches,” adding, “He reaches out to a lot of people. … We don’t discuss who works on what. It’s all just the Romney campaign. Everything is just the Romney campaign.
Politico says Stevens brought in Peter Wehner, who wrote speeches for George W. Bush and also worked on the White House staffs of Bush’s father and Ronald Reagan, for Romney’s critical acceptance speech.
But with little more than a week to go, at a time when Romney should have been practicing and honing his words, Stevens decided to throw it all out and tapped John McConnell and Matthew Scully, who had also worked for the second President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, to start anew.
McConnell and Scully were also working on the acceptance speech for Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan, so were forced to divide their time, Politico reports.
In the end, their speech too ended up in the trash, with only one line — about how Romney’s father brought a rose to his mother’s bedside every morning — being used in the final version, which was essentially written by Stevens and Romney himself.
The Politico report is highly critical of Stevens’ handling of his candidate, saying that many conservatives view the all-important campaign as “specifics-free and lame.” It says one inside joke among Republicans is that the campaign badly needs a consultant from Romney’s former company, Bain, to straighten it out.
But it points out that, as the man at the top, Romney must carry much of the blame for the campaign that has been slammed for failing to eat into President Barack Obama’s lead in the polls. Last week, Fox News contributor Pat Caddell blasted the campaign as “the worst in my lifetime.”
Stevens defended himself to Politico. “Politics is like sports,” he said. “A lot of people have ideas, and there’s no right or wrong. You just have to chart a course, and stay on that course.”
And one anonymous official in the campaign insisted the organization will not improve as the race for the White House enters its final phase. “Mitt is a sticker — he stays with you,” the official said.
“He had a reputation at Bain for sticking with people. They made a bad investment, he hung with them. … None of this is going to be fixed. This is the organization, and this is who Mitt is betting on to win. There aren’t going to be further changes.”
© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
RG: a follow up to earlier.
rgrikki92 ConorBthe article about Romney is ridiculous ConorB, I enjoy the banter and I think I give as good as I get. As to the article, it's reporting what's happening behind the scenes by experienced political reporters. Take what you see and leave the rest.
ConorBthe article about Romney is ridiculous
ConorB, I enjoy the banter and I think I give as good as I get. As to the article, it's reporting what's happening behind the scenes by experienced political reporters. Take what you see and leave the rest.
I don't know how you can stick it for so long... No, when I said "The article is ridiculous" I was quoting what Dennis said - i.e. How can the article be ridiculous yet a photo comparing The P.O.U.S. to JOSEF STALIN is somehow fine?
ConorBI don't know how you can stick it for so long... No, when I said "The article is ridiculous" I was quoting what Dennis said - i.e. How can the article be ridiculous yet a photo comparing The P.O.U.S. to JOSEF STALIN is somehow fine?
I understood, just used the quote to act as a thread.
Monday, 17 September 2012 10:10 By Robert Reich, Robert Reich's Blog | News Analysis
Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), on stage after Romney accepted the Republican presidential nomination during the Republican National Convention at the Tampa Bay Times Forum in Tampa, Florida, August 30. (Photo: Josh Haner / The New York Times)
Unemployment is still above 8 percent, job gains aren't even keeping up with population growth, the economy is barely moving forward. And yet, according to most polls, the Romney-Ryan ticket is falling further and further behind. How can this be?
Because Republicans are failing the central test of electability. Instead of putting together the largest possible coalition of voters, they're relying largely on one slice of America — middle-aged white men — and alienating just about everyone else.
Start with Hispanics, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they become an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney-Ryan by a larger margin than they did six months ago.
Why? In last February's Republican primary debate Romney dubbed Arizona's controversial immigration policy – that authorized police to demand proof of citizenship from anyone looking Hispanic — a "model law" for the rest of the nation.
Romney then attacked GOP rival Texas Governor Rick Perry for supporting in-state tuition at the University of Texas for children of undocumented immigrants. And Romney advocates what he calls "self-deportation" – making life so difficult for undocumented immigrants and their families that they choose to leave.
As if all this weren't enough, the GOP has been pushing voter ID laws all over America, whose obvious aim is to intimidate Hispanic voters so they won't come to the polls. But they may be having the opposite effect – emboldening the vast majority of ethnic Hispanics, who are American citizens, to vote in even greater numbers and lend even more support to Obama and other Democrats.
Or consider women – whose political and economic impact in America continues to grow (women are fast becoming better educated than men and the major breadwinners in American homes). According to polls, the political gender gap is widening.
Why? It's not just GOP senatorial candidate Todd Akin's call to ban all abortions even in the case of "legitimate rape" (because he believes women's bodies somehow reject violent sperm). The GOP platform itself seeks to bar all abortions, with no exception for rape or incest. And on several occasions Paul Ryan has voted in favor of exactly such legislation.
Meanwhile, Republican legislators in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Idaho, and Alabama have pushed bills requiring women seeking abortions to undergo invasive vaginal ultrasound tests. All told, over 400 Republican bills are pending in state legislatures, attacking womens' reproductive rights.
Republicans have repeatedly voted against legislation giving women equal pay for the same work as men. Republicans in Wisconsin have even repealed a law designed to prevent employers from discriminating against women.
Or consider students – a significant and growing electoral force, who voted overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008. What are Republicans doing to woo them back?
Paul Ryan's budget plan – approved by almost every House Republican and enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney – would have allowed rates on student loans to double, adding an average of $1,000 a year to student debt loads. (Under mounting political pressure, House Republicans came up with just enough money to keep the loan program going safely past Election Day by raiding a fund established for preventive care in the new health-care act.)
Now Romney wants to hand the federal student loan program over to the banks, which will charge even more. Earlier this year he argued subsidized student loans were bad because they encouraged colleges to raise their tuition, and suggested students ask their families for money.
Republicans have even managed to antagonize seniors by seeking to turn Medicare into vouchers whose value won't keep up with rising healthcare costs, and cutting $800 billion out of Medicaid (which many seniors rely on for nursing home care).
And, of course, they've come out against equal marriage rights for gay couples.
Romney, Ryan, and the GOP don't seem to know how to satisfy their middle-aged white male base without at the same time turning off everyone who's not white, male, straight, or middle-aged. Unfortunately for Romney and Ryan, the people they're turning off are the majority.
ConorBNo, when I said "The article is ridiculous" I was quoting what Dennis said - i.e. How can the article be ridiculous yet a photo comparing The P.O.U.S. to JOSEF STALIN is somehow fine?
sorry for the ambiguity, I was addressing Dennis
Oh, my. Mother Jones has what it says is a video of Mitt Romney talking to donors; it sure looks and sounds real. And it reveals a candidate who despises half the country:
There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.
Actually, if you look at the facts, you learn that the great bulk of those who pay no income tax pay other taxes; also, many of the people in the no-income-tax category are (a) elderly (b) students or (c) having a bad year, having lost a job — that is, they’re people who have paid income taxes in the past and/or will pay income taxes in the future. The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque.
If this is real, it’s very, very ugly.
rgrikki92 The Real Romney Oh, my. Mother Jones has what it says is a video of Mitt Romney talking to donors; it sure looks and sounds real. And it reveals a candidate who despises half the country: There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax. Actually, if you look at the facts, you learn that the great bulk of those who pay no income tax pay other taxes; also, many of the people in the no-income-tax category are (a) elderly (b) students or (c) having a bad year, having lost a job — that is, they’re people who have paid income taxes in the past and/or will pay income taxes in the future. The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque. If this is real, it’s very, very ugly.
Saw it earlier, it looks real..guy is crazy, Bush looks great in comparison
ConorBSaw it earlier, it looks real..guy is crazy, Bush looks great in comparison
this is Romney being his true self down at the hood. Of course his hood is filled with mansions just like us common folk?
I like that us "COMMON FOLK" . There are definitely more common than rich. Wont use the term wealthy as I think thats been changed to suit however COMMON FOLK is age old and will always be the same. I think it would do a lot of folk real good to realize they are just COMMON FOLK and the current GOP platform has no F'ing use for them. Richard Nixon understood the rest of those guys didnt have a clue and were and still able to mislead all the damn COMMON FOLK that vote their way. Tax break and call me in the morning. LMAO !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Thanks rgrikki92 and doughboy and all the rest that give this thread a COMMON FOLK viewpoint. Appears to me country be damned dominates the views I read here. Dont blame BUSH? Who the hell else sholud be blamed? Obama is the GREAT DESTROYER? Hard to destroy what has already been ruined. He has the right idea "build and strengthen your middle class" not trickle down economics that shit has never worked and will never work.
its getting harder for romney to paint himself as that caring individual he thinks he is
www.motherjones.com/.../secret-video-romney-private-fundraiser