Mitt Romney is mad. Wouldn’t you be mad if you had double digit lead in the polls in South Carolina only to squander that lead in a matter of days and then lose to Newt Gingrich by twelve points? Wouldn’t you be kicking yourself not releasing your tax returns even though your top advisers had exhorted you to do so? This is not where Mitt Romney expected to be going into the Florida Primary. He was supposed to have gone three for three in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. Instead with only the Granite state in his pocket, Romney has entered the Sunshine State facing his winter of discontent. So now Romney is going after Gingrich with everything he’s got. In light of the fact that Romney will soon release his tax returns, he is accusing Gingrich of “potentially wrongful activity of some kind” by not registering as a lobbyist for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, called upon him to return compensation he received from Fannie & Freddie and for good measure called him “highly erratic.” You can be sure that Romney will be raising this and then some during the two Florida debates this week. While these charges might once again raise doubts about the former House Speaker, will it necessarily benefit Romney? After all, Romney is telling Republican primary voters why they shouldn’t vote for Gingrich. But it doesn’t tell them why they should cast their fate with him. After all, when the Romney PAC went after Gingrich, it ended up benefitting Rick Santorum. So therein lay the problem. What is the raison d’être of Romney’s candidacy? Well, his main selling point has been his experience in the private sector. Yet when that experience is challenged, Romney displays the kind of thin skin reminiscent of President Obama. Romney equates criticism of his time at Bain Capital with criticism of free enterprise itself. That Romney considers his private sector record beyond question is a strong indication that he treats the Republican nomination as if it were an entitlement. And here we thought Romney wanted to earn his way to the nomination. At the very minimum, he has to do more than earn it in New Hampshire. Frankly, aside from a clear cut victory in the Granite State, the only thing Romney has earned during this campaign is suspicion from many Republican primary voters. His reluctance to release his tax returns gave suspicion that he was being evasive and had something to hide. Romney also earned suspicion when he said he enjoyed firing people who provided services to him. Yeah, yeah, I know he was referring to health care providers. But is it really a stretch of the imagination to believe he also enjoyed firing people while he was at Bain? At the very minimum, these were not very carefully chosen words and he said them far too casually. In a time of high unemployment, are those struggling to make ends meet going to trust the economy in the hands of someone who derives any kind of enjoyment out of firing people? Of course, Romney continues to earn suspicion from Republican primary voters for being a conservative of convenience. It is all well and good for Romney to extol Ronald Reagan’s virtues and to say he wants America “to remain the shining city on the hill.” But when he was running against Ted Kennedy here in Massachusetts in 1994, Romney wanted absolutely nothing to do with Reagan when he said , “I was an independent during the time of Reagan-Bush. I’m not trying to return to Reagan-Bush.” While one can criticize Newt Gingrich for being at odds with conservatives at various points over the years, he led Republicans to a majority in the House of Representatives and no one can take that away from him however some might try. And where was Romney while Newt was championing the Contract With America? He was calling it a “not a good idea” and a “mistake.” I understand that Mitt Romney is angry at Newt Gingrich for stealing his thunder in South Carolina. But while Romney directs his anger at the former Speaker, Newt will be content to direct his anger at President Obama and the liberal media who protect him. If Romney isn’t careful and lets his anger towards Newt get the better of him, he could help clear a path for Newt to the White House even more than he has already.
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Mitt Throws a Fit
With regard to Paul Ryan’s criticism of Newt Gingrich, I respectfully disagree with Joe Lawler’s assertion the other GOP candidates have “signed on” to
RedState Morning Briefing For October 20, 2011 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. 1. All Huffy, Joe Biden Stands By Rape Reference to GOP 2. Thin Skin 3. Harry Reid: ‘Private Sector Jobs are Doing Just Fine; It’s the Public Sector Jobs Where We’ve Lost Huge Numbers’ 4. Mitt Romney Bleeds. I Star in the Film 5. Exacerbating Distrust ———————————————————————- 1. All Huffy, Joe Biden Stands By Rape Reference to GOP Vice President Joe Biden now says he didn’t make a reference to rape, and got testy with HUMAN EVENTS when we asked if he would like to retract his comments that the number of sexual assaults would increase if Republicans don’t sign on to Barack Obama’s latest “jobs” proposal. “I didn’t use, no no no…Let’s get it straight, guy. Don’t screw around with me,” Biden lashed out at HUMAN EVENTS. Then Biden confirmed that he indeed did talk about rape in terms of the President’s spending measure. “Murder will continue to rise, rape will continue to rise, all crimes will continue to rise,” if the Democrats agenda isn’t passed, he added. Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. Thin Skin It finally hit me tonight why I think Mitt Romney would have a real problem in the general election. He is Barack Obama. No, not really. But yeah, there is something there. They are both robotically good on the campaign trail. But throw them off guard, get them off balance, and they turn a bit nasty. Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. Harry Reid: ‘Private Sector Jobs are Doing Just Fine; It’s the Public Sector Jobs Where We’ve Lost Huge Numbers’ Here’s Sen. Reid’s (D-NV) statement from the Senate floor today: “The massive layoffs we’ve had in America today-of course they’re rooted in the last administration-and it’s very clear that private sector jobs are doing just fine. It’s the public sector jobs where we’ve lost huge numbers, and that’s what this legislation’s all about. And it’s unfortunate my friend the Republican Leader is complaining about that. I would also note that my friend said the House passed another bill. Well, they pass lots of bills, but they rarely go anyplace.” Here’s a fact that Reid should look over before he opens his mouth again. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, government workers have the lowest unemployment rate of any industry or class recorded, at 4.7%, while the national unemployment rate is 9.1% – nearly twice that of public sector workers. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. Mitt Romney Bleeds. I Star in the Film This is a necessary attack from Mitt Romney. Had he not pushed something out like this, the story would be that Mitt Romney got wounded last night. In several unscripted, unguarded moments he mentioned he failed to keep costs down in Massachusetts and was worried about illegals working for him because he was running for political office. Mitt Romney had to do this. Please click here for the rest of the post. 5. Exacerbating Distrust Even Mitt Romney’s advisors will admit that they see what the rest of us see. In the Real Clear Politics polling average going back all the way to November of 2010, Mitt Romney has never gotten above 25.0% in the polling average. It is a real ceiling for him. The campaign had hoped that by encouraging states to escalate the time table and getting endorsements like Chris Christie’s they’d (1) build an air of inevitability, (2) get voters to start settling for him, and (3) keep the field against him so fractured that consolidation could not be possible before the clock ran out. It is still a viable strategy if the field does not consolidate. Please click here for the rest of the post.
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Morning Briefing for October 20, 2011
The press corps has a mild buzz going about a weekend contretemps ginned up, for publicity sake, by Sarah Palin’s camp, in her ongoing campaign to show how badly she is victimized by the media. The odd thing is that she has been victimized by the media, horribly so, and many of us (myself included, in several posts after the Gabby Giffords shooting) have rushed to her defense — so she doesn’t need to gin up controversies out of thin air. But that’s exactly what she and her team did this past weekend. What happened was that Alex Pappas of The Daily Caller, one of the rising stars among political scribes and a meticulously careful and wonderfully polite, fair-minded young man (an aside: I’ve known him since he was in junior high school), wrote a perfectly fine story about Palin’s current stances vis-a-vis the presidential race. In it, one of the things she said was that if Mitt Romney is the nominee, well, of course she would endorse him over Barack Obama. Fox Nation picked up the story and, in its own headline (not Pappas’, not the Daily Caller’s, but its own headline completely apart from anything Pappas ever wrote) played up the “Romney endorse” angle in a way that apparently did not make it clear that the endorsement might be in the general election, rather than the primary campaign. (The headline is no longer available at Fox Nation, so I can’t say exactly what the wording was.) Anyway, the Palin team pounced. Specifically inviting over reporter Kasie Hunt from Politico so she could hear the exchange, Palin called Pappas’ cell phone and began berating him in a very scolding manner for writing a headline suggesting she supports Romney. Pappas didn’t even know what she was talking about. When he tried to say that neither he nor his editors had written such a headline, she said she didn’t have time for this, that she needed to go back to the “real people” at the State Fair, and hung up on him. Later, when it became clear that Fox Nation, not Pappas or The Daily Caller, had written the semi-offending headline, a Palin press aide called Pappas back not to apologize but to say that they now realized it was Fox and that the headline had been taken down. “No,” Pappas said, far more bemused than angry or upset, “he didn’t come close to apologizing.” Added Pappas, again lightly rather than angrily: “It was definitely ironic when she was the one complaining about a reporter being sloppy when she was the one being sloppy by complaining to the wrong reporter.” Look, it’s one thing for Palin to complain about unfair press. She has a right to do so. It’s also understandable that somebody might, at first glance, mis-read an online piece in a way that makes the original source unclear. But, really, somebody with so much experience in the public eye should know A) that reporters often don’t write their own headlines; B) that there is a difference between an original news story, on one hand, and a partial reprint of a story on a news aggregator such as Fox Nation; C) that if the text of a story doesn’t match the headline, it is only the text, not the headline, that is the reporter’s doing; and D) that such a small mis-impression isn’t worth getting hot under the collar about. I mean, really, talk about a thin skin! This was absurd. What was even more absurd is that she and her team deliberately played it up by inviting one reporter over just to hear her berate another reporter. That’s unprofessional on its face, and it’s also really odd in that the reporter they called over works for a publication often accused of leaning left, while the (innocent) reporter being berated works for a publication accused of leaning right — and one whose whole story, in the first place, was entirely accurate and showed absolutely no animus against Palin or even anything that would put Palin in a bad light. If Palin wants to get rid of the image of being a difficult diva with a rude streak, she needs to stop acting like a difficult diva with a rude streak.
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Palin Cheap-Shots a Good Reporter
RedState Morning Briefing For July 14, 2011 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. 1. Book Your Rooms For The Gathering 2. Jim DeMint Will Be at the RedState Gathering. Will You? 3. Dear Mr. Speaker 4. Our Petulant Child President 5. Moody’s Rejects McConnell’s ‘Pontius Pilate Act’ ———————————————————————- 1. Book Your Rooms For The Gathering The Third Annual RedState Gathering is coming up very soon — and we’d like to invite you to attend. With the race for the GOP presidential nomination shifting into high gear, this much-anticipated annual gathering promises to be the best one yet. It will be held on August 12-14 at the Francis Marion Hotel in Charleston, South Carolina — and will feature as its keynote speaker South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. To read all about the Gathering, click here . To register for the Gathering, click here Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. Jim DeMint Will Be at the RedState Gathering. Will You? So, let us review. Nikki Haley will be at the RedState Gathering. Rick Perry will be at the RedState Gathering. Ted Cruz will be at the RedState Gathering. And now, Jim DeMint is confirmed to be at the RedState Gathering. Have you registered yet? Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. Dear Mr. Speaker Last night the President engaged in off Broadway theatrics trying to scare the Republicans into folding on debt ceiling negotiations. Playing the role of Hollywood President, not the real President, the President said he didn’t care if this brought down his Presidency and he would not yield. He then dared Eric Cantor to call his bluff. Mr. Speaker, this is a man giving away the game. This is the poker player smiling and shifting in his seat trying to fake you into thinking he has an awesome hand. The dramatics are a Hollywood production — a facade hiding a bitter reality for Barack Obama. Mr. Speaker, this is the strongest sign yet that you should hold the line. David Gergen and I had a conversation last night with Nichole Wallace and Anderson Cooper. Mr. Gergen said something interesting, Mr. Speaker. It got me thinking. He said President Obama had to raise the debt ceiling. He said President Obama just had to do whatever it took to raise the debt ceiling and deal with everything else later. Mr. Speaker, Mr. Gergen is right. See, in history, we remember James Buchanan causing the Civil War. Not Congress. We remember Abraham Lincoln winning the war. Not Congress. We remember Andrew Johnson failing to finish reconciliation the way Lincoln wanted. Not Congress. We remember Woodrow Wilson failing to establish the League of Nations. Not Congress. We remember Herbert Hoover causing the Great Depression. Not Congress. We remember Franklin Roosevelt for saving us from the Depression and war. Not Congress. We credit John F. Kennedy for inspiring a nation of youth and leading us to the moon. Not Congress. We credit Lyndon Johnson with passing the Great Society. Not Congress. We blame Jimmy Carter for out of control inflation in the 70?s. Not Congress. We credit Ronald Reagan with cutting taxes. Not Congress. We blame George H. W. Bush for raising taxes. Not Congress. We praise Bill Clinton for balancing a budget. Not Congress. We credit George W. Bush with No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Immigration Reform attempts, TARP, and the GM bailout. Not Congress. Hell, when people hear Osama Bin Laden is dead, Barack Obama gets the credit, not the SEALs. And we credit him for passing Obamacare, for better or worse, even when Congressional Democrats did all the heavy lifting. You see Mr. Speaker, we know Barack Obama is thin skinned and we know he is mindful of his legacy. This is why Barack Obama stormed out of a meeting with Republicans last night when they confronted him with the fact that his supposed spending cuts are accounting gimmicks. Barack Obama, for the sake of his legacy, cannot afford to be the President under whom America’s credit tanks and under whom America defaults on its debts. History will not blame Congress. History will blame Barack Obama for not doing what it takes to lead and for failing to do what it takes, no matter the cost, to keep the U.S. solvent. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. Our Petulant Child President “US President Barack Obama stormed out of tense debt-limit talks Wednesday with his top Republican foes after declaring he was ready to stake his reelection on the outcome, a Republican aide said.” This isn’t a surprise to anyone who has been playing attention to our child president over the past three years. The Obama administration has been a veritable Mecca for narcissism and incompetence from the time Obama took the oath of office. Now, for the first time since taking office, Obama is forced to make a decision that entailed personal risk. It isn’t a pretty sight. Please click here for the rest of the post. 5. Moody’s Rejects McConnell’s ‘Pontius Pilate Act’ Moody’s Investor Services is sending out a pretty clear rejection of Mitch McConnell’s “Pontius Pilate Pass the Buck Act of 2011.” Republicans and Democrats who are spinning it in favor of folding like a cheap suit and just raising the debt ceiling should pay attention. Please click here for the rest of the post.
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Morning Briefing for July 14, 2011
