Posts Tagged ‘Campaigns’

The Word From On High: Shut Up About Romney

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

He Wants Us To Shut Up

This is what is being pushed today in conservative media.  At first, I thought it was just me receiving emails urging me to begin rallying around Romney “for the good of the party” and “for the good of the country.”  Apparently, I’m not alone, and apparently, Mark Levin is receiving such emails too.  I thank those of you who sent me such emails, but I’ll give you my answer here, in the open: I have deleted your emails with extreme prejudice.  (That means that I deleted them, then undeleted them, and deleted them AGAIN…just for fun.) I actually printed one out that had been particularly annoying, and deleted it with a match.   The Romney Campaign does not pick the nominee on this blog.  Don’t email me as an activist for the Romney campaign, urging me to stop talking about Romney.  I’m going to talk about Romney’s extensive failings until he wins or loses.  I’m going to remind my readers of the truth about this candidate.  While a blog is like an “etch-a-sketch,” or like Mitt Romney(apparently the same,) I am not.  Conservatives don’t give up or give over that easily, and I’ll be damned before I’ll be prodded into it.

Even tonight on the promo for the 8pm-er (Bill O’Reilly,) he was hollering about “stop[ping] this stuff.”  I see.  When Mitt’s campaign staffer came out and shoved both hooves down his own throat on CNN yesterday, we should ignore it, get beyond it, and stop talking about it, but when Newt Gingrich said two words about Mitt Romney’s activities at Bain Capital, we should pile on for weeks on end.  Or, when Newt Gingrich’s ex-wife is trotted out to slam him by ABC News, we should talk about it for weeks on end.  When Rick Santorum mentions the evils of pornography as an aside, that should dominate the headlines and stories for weeks.  When Mitt Romney runs ads accusing his rivals of being less than conservative, while claiming he is, we should ignore Eric Fehrnstrom’s remarks to CNN.  I see…

Well, I don’t see!  I don’t see why Mitt Romney is somehow exempt, or why it is that the flubs and foibles of his campaign should be ignored, while his own operatives in media spend time hammering away on his opponents.  You Romney flacks(and I don’t here mean average Romney supporters, I mean his activist set) are full of yourselves lately, and it’s getting out of control, and there’s a reason your candidate’s negatives are on the steep incline: Your candidate has been repeatedly exposed as non-conservative, and yesterday’s remarks by Fehrnstrom are merely confirmations of what we’ve known.

It’s time to deal with reality. The conservative base of the Republican party doesn’t want another establishment candidate.  They may be divided over which of the others should be the anti-Mitt, but they’re sure it shouldn’t be him.  The reason is simple, and despite the cajoling, I’m not going away, and I’m not going to forget.  I’m going to remind my readers every time it strikes me to do so that Mitt Romney is fatally flawed.  Today, Barack Obama provided an example of what he’s going to do to Romney over health-care, and it’s why Romney will abandon the issue of Obamacare come the Fall campaign.

Get ready for it.  Get ready for it to be the issue Romney avoids like the plague, and Obama is already testing the waters of his campaign on that basis.  (More on that later.)  The thing to realize is that the Romney campaign and all of its myriad establishment surrogates are making a big push to kill this process off before they get to the states in which he’ll be weak.  More, the Etch-a-Sketch remark is doing substantial damage because it taps into what many conservatives worried about Romney from the outset: He’s ideologically flimsy at best, and I would argue simply vacuous.  While none of the writers who contacted me on Thursday on Romney’s behalf admitted or purported to be part of the Romney official campaign, I noticed none of them were subscribers to this blog either.  That’s the giveaway, along with the very narrow window in which all the emails arrived. Conservatives shouldn’t permit themselves to be bullied by the Romney campaign.   You can bet I won’t.

 

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Posted in Conservatism, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, News, Politics | 11 Comments »

Romney’s Failing Strategy of Attack

Wednesday, February 8th, 2012

Where Will He Point Now?

For quite some time, Mitt Romney’s strategy has been to attack his opponents through surrogates, media shills, and advertising, but with few exceptions, while he has made a case against his opponents, sometimes less than honestly, he has failed to make a case for his own candidacy.  Conservative voters are not herded by fear in most instances, and while you can occasionally turn them off from supporting a candidate if you can create enough of a negative buzz, what will not usually happen in such cases is to drive them into your own arms.  This tactic works well when it’s a two-candidate primary, particularly with a mind-numbed lefty electorate, but in a four-way race with conservative voters, what can happen is what we have seen in Colorado, Minnesota, and Missouri: Mitt Romney has so thoroughly bashed Gingrich that he succeeded only in driving voters in those states to somebody else.  Gingrich lost.  Romney lost.  Santorum won.

I think part of this grows out of Romney’s reliance on tactics that might have been valid in a more liberal state like the one he governed, where he could not gain victory without at least enticing some of a liberal mindset.  In Massachusetts, there are certainly Republicans, but the conservative wing of the party is small and mostly ineffective.  On a national scale, this is not true, and Romney will not be able to beat one conservative down without another rising in his place.  Romney’s strategy may still get him the nomination by slow, steady attrition, but that will not win the general election in November when he will need the entirety of the nation’s conservative base out pulling his wagon if he is to have any hope of overcoming Obama.  You cannot repeatedly offend conservatives and expect them to energize on your behalf, and this is what McCain had done over many years, and his best move was to nominate Sarah Palin, which was almost enough to overcome the ineptitude of his own campaign.

Mitt Romney is not likely to get such a bump from any of those he might choose to be his running mate.  He may be stuck on a flat-line of a grudging support from some conservatives, while a fair number simply turn away in disgust.  I think the latter has already begun, and the fact that in Colorado’s loss to Santorum, where in 2008, he won by a huge margin, what you’re seeing is the beginnings of the tell-tale signs of this collapse in his support.  His lack of a clear message and a positive campaign don’t remind people of Reagan, and it doesn’t set him much apart from liberals.  To many conservative voters, it appears as though Romney is simply playing the slash-and-burn politics of the left, and most conservatives don’t really want any part of that.

Mitt Romney started this campaign season with every advantage: High name recognition, good financing, well-oiled organization, and the happy support of the establishment wing of the GOP.  Now his name recognition no longer matters so much, and it’s clear that he can be beaten even when he spends overwhelming sums of money, and the establishment is not so happy this morning as they view what could be the reason to yank the rug from beneath Romney, and either try to buy influence with one of the others, or simply bring in a ringer.  Just looking at the tone on FoxNews last night and this morning, it’s like people at a funeral trying to convince themselves that it’s really a birthday party.

Romney’s arguments about electability and consistency seem now to fade, as the electorate realizes that all of this “inevitability” talk had been the fanciful expressions of one who had been a legend in his own mind.  Romney’s not invincible, and hasn’t been, but the GOP establishment wanted you to believe this so they could put their guy out front.  Now that Romney’s been taken down a few pegs, it remains to be seen whether he will continue his strategy of slash-and-burn against his opponents, or instead re-engineer his campaign to accentuate his positives.  If I were a betting man, I’d wager on the former, if only because there’s so damnably little of the latter.

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Posted in Campaigns, Election 2012, GOP Candidates, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics | 7 Comments »

Ron Paul’s Mitt Romney Ad Is a Hoot!

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

Perfect Android Politician?

I have been watching to see if somebody would send me a link to an anti-Mitt ad run by Ron Paul, and my real focus was on televised ads.  I’m still looking for evidence(since I don’t live in any of the first five states) to suggest he ran one on television as part of a paid advertising buy.  I know he did run lots of anti-Gingrich and at least a few anti-Santorum ads in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, but I wasn’t there to see all of those ads.  Now comes this ad from early January, and I don’t know if it actually aired anywhere, or has been merely a web ad.(There are many more of the latter floating around.)  This ad aims squarely at Romney, and it is exceedingly effective.  If this ad aired anywhere, and you know about it, please let me know.  If not, it should be brought up to date(Perry is a minor player in the ad) and aired somewhere, because it’s devastating. Truly:

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Posted in Campaigns, Election 2012, Media, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, Ron Paul, video | 13 Comments »

The Curious Approach of Newt Gingrich

Sunday, January 29th, 2012

Newt's Got a Plan

Few things have been clearer than what this past week has made apparent:  The GOP establishment doesn’t want to win an honest fight, and those who comprise it don’t believe we should have any say whatsoever.  Whether you’re a staunch conservative, or a Tea Party patriot, there can be no way to miss the point demonstrated by a week-long attack-fest aimed at Newt Gingrich.  We’re not part of their party, and they will choose the nominee, and if we don’t like it, we can just shut up and go away.  Well, we’re not going away, and we won’t be shut up, and we’re going to call them on their twisted, half-truth ridden distortions in media, and we’re going to turn off their networks, and avoid their favorite in-the-tank websites, and we’re going to forge ahead without them if necessary.  The simple truth is that the GOP establishment needs our support much more than we need theirs, and with the direction this is going, I can’t see a single reason to support them or their chosen candidate.  Meanwhile, something else is brewing, and I take note, because watching Gingrich speak, I realized there was a change, and it manifested Saturday night.

Watching Herman Cain endorse Newt Gingrich on Saturday night, I think I glimpsed a bit of the future, because I think what Gingrich has been saying from the outset of this race is correct:  We must all set aside our petty differences and find a way to engineer victory as a team.  So far, among the candidates who entered the race, and have subsequently departed it, Cain and Perry, each once a front-runner, have endorsed Newt Gingrich. Now while it’s the undisputed truth that conservatives are a generally independent-minded lot, I don’t think we should fail to notice this.  I’ve told you before that a candidate who was an aggregate of the best parts of all of these would be great for the country, but alas, no such candidate stepped forward.  What we’re watching now, as Gingrich integrates these former competitors into his team is the result of having treated both of these men with due respect to their positions and experiences and accomplishments over their lives.  Gingrich has a big idea, all right, but it’s not about some mission to the moon.  Instead, I believe he’s focusing on building a team that can win in November and take the country back from Barack Obama.

This represents a serious departure from previous campaigns, as when the vanquished left the scene, frequently never to be seen again.   Think about what this will mean to the strength of the GOP team come November if Gingrich is the nominee.  He’s building a governing majority now, with the party as his first target.  Meanwhile, Mitt Romney is tooling around trying to further divisions in the party.  Are we now witnessing what is effectively the updated version of the Reagan coalition?  That would be a stunning achievement, and while he’s a long way from having accomplished it, that he’s seeing that far down the road is a hopeful sign.  Nothing is more prone to failure than an ad hoc campaign without direct and vision guiding it forward.  Whatever else you may think of Gingrich, it’s now clear to me that he has a plan, and if just a little luck breaks his way, he might not only capture the nomination, but also the presidency.

It’s always been true that the most effective presidents were those who could put together a governing coalition that permitted the best people to lead with their strengths and their passions.  If Gingrich is figuring out the way to do this effectively, then we as conservatives should be thankful, whether we intend to support him in the primaries or not.  We need somebody at the head of this movement who can focus and direct its energies not only to electoral victory, but to a concrete plan of restoring our nation.  Could Gingrich be that leader, after all?  I’ve certainly had my misgivings, and as Sarah Palin reminds us, he is a “flawed vessel,” but as she also points out, nobody is perfect and without troubles.  Can Gingrich be a true reformer?  He’s done it before, certainly, because his accomplishments in leading the Republicans to sweeping victory in 1994 was a marvel  in modern American history.   Could he do it again?

Time will tell, but for now at least, we know with certainty one thing:  Newt has a plan.

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Posted in Barack Obama, Election 2012, GOP Candidates, Herman Cain, News, Newt Gingrich, Politics | 3 Comments »

Ooopsie: Romney’s ’08 Campaign Video Surfaces!

Saturday, January 28th, 2012

Okay, Maybe Not the "ONLY"

This is comical, because Romney’s campaign has been scrubbing their ’08 anti-McCain ads from all over the Internet, now that they have the long-serving Arizona Republican’s endorsement for 2012, but apparently, they forgot to scrub their Myspace page, and before they shut this down, you may want to take a look at how they clobbered McCain in 2008, as they now do an even greater distortion in media against Newt Gingrich.  This video probably won’t be up much longer, but here’s Romney bashing the guy who he is now carting around on his campaign.  If, as the ad contends, McCain had been Democrats’ favorite Republican, what then can we say about Romney now that the two are so tight in 2012?

Hoof? Meet mouth!

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.1011197&w=425&h=350&fv=m%3D26899461%26type%3Dvideo%26a%3D0]

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Posted in Campaigns, Election 2012, GOP Establishment, Media, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, video | 9 Comments »

Rubio Neutral or ‘Stealth’ Romney?

Wednesday, January 25th, 2012

Neutral?

Senator Marco Rubio, (R-FL,) may have given a clue to his true attachments.  Rubio ripped Newt Gingrich over an ad being aired on Spanish-language in Florida that accuses Romney of being anti-immigrant.  Said Rubio: “This kind of language is more than just unfortunate. It’s inaccurate, inflammatory, and doesn’t belong in this campaign,” according to the Miami Herald.  Rubio has behaved as though he’s been on Team Romney all along, since Romney endorsed him in 2010, and he also doesn’t mention that it had been one of his top staffers who was behind the scenes pushing Florida to move its primaries forward, thus driving Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina to move their contests forward.  The Rubio camp denied it, but it was assumed moving the early states up would give Romney an opportunity to wrap up the nomination race early.

It’s not surprising to see Rubio pick sides in a fight like this, since in truth, he chose sides long ago, but to see him continue to fly under the radar with his leanings toward Romney, it’s pathetic to see this otherwise promising young Senator, himself the son of immigrants, make of himself a shill for the most liberal Republican remaining in the race.  I think he should openly endorse Romney to unmask himself fully, but since he depends upon Tea Party support, you shouldn’t assume Rubio would be forthcoming.  According to the Miami Herald:

“Rubio plans to stay neutral in the race. He’s a potential running mate whom both candidates would love to have on the ballot. And he’s gaining iconic status among many national Republicans who see him as a face of the future in a nation that’s growing more Latino.”

I don’t see how Rubio can claim to remain neutral.   I don’t remember hearing from him when Romney was spending millions on ads in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina(never mind Florida,) that had been fraught with inaccuracies and downright untruths.  Where was “Senator Neutral” then?  He’s out there attacking Gingrich, and defending Romney, as in this Tampa Bay Times story:

“Mitt Romney is no Charlie Crist. Romney is a conservative. and he was one of the first national Republican leaders to endorse me. He came to Florida, campaigned hard for me, and made a real difference in my race.”

This statement by Rubio makes me question his integrity.  To pretend that Romney is a conservative is simply dishonest, and one would ordinarily assume the Florida Senator would know better, but at least he did mention here the obvious reason for his bias, despite the ludicrous claims to “neutrality.”  Rubio has also denied he is angling for the bottom of a Romney ticket, but it’s clear that at least with respect to the 2010 endorsement by Romney, for his Senate campaign, Rubio is on the hook for 2012.  I wonder how much “help” Rubio might have gotten, but I do note that according to OpenSecrets.org,  among both Romney’s and Rubio’s top 25 contributors, there’s some interesting overlap, including Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase. Now of course, this doesn’t prove any conclusive connections, but it clearly shows there is a some funding similarities, although it’s true to say that these same contributors show high up on the list of many politicians’ contributors, and in both parties.

Don’t misunderstand my criticism of Rubio. I’m not suggesting he has some obligation not to take sides, but he’s taking sides to a degree that challenges his alleged “neutrality.”  While he may not endorse for the Florida primary, he ought to simply say which direction he’s leaning in some form.  Otherwise, it looks like he’s being a stealth advocate for Romney, but doing a rather poor job of being stealthy.  His reason for supporting Romney is likely no more than Romney’s endorsement of his candidacy in 2010, but then say it.  I think it’s important that particularly in his home state’s primary, he should play straight with voters who are interested to know his opinion, or at least how he will vote when the time comes.

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Posted in Campaigns, Election 2012, Mitt Romney, News, Newt Gingrich, Politics | 5 Comments »