Daughter of the Curse of the Living Romneys

It seems like just a couple of days ago I was writing about how the Romney family just can’t seem to leave Michigan alone. Okay, it WAS just a couple of days ago. At that time, I wrote about how Mitt’s older brother Scott, an attorney few have ever heard of and a man with no almost no experience as an elected official [I have been informed that Mr. Romney once sat on the Michigan State University Board of Trustees from 2000 to 2008], was pondering running for Senator Carl Levin’s seat when he retires next year. Well, two short days later, he has decided NOT to run after all.

But that doesn’t mean we won’t have a Romney family member to ridicule for running for a national seat with no previous experience whatsoever. Turns out that after Mr. Romney’s decision not to run, he reached into the famous Romney Binder Full of Women™ and now his daughter Ronna Romney McDaniel is “looking at it”:

Her father, Scott Romney, Mitt’s older brother, told The News that after initially considering a run he has decided against a bid for the seat held for more than three decades by Levin, D-Detroit.

“I decided it just wasn’t right for me at this time,” Scott Romney said.

Instead, he phoned his daughter Tuesday to urge her to consider.

“I think she’d be great,” Romney said. “She’s been very active in the party. She worked very hard for my brother all across the state. She’s a great campaigner, a great organizer and she’s a great leader. She really does have an ability to connect with people’s concerns.”

Here’s a list of the elected positions Ms. Romney McDaniel has held in her 39 years as a public servant member of a wealthy family:

I guess when you have access to the kind of cash a Romney family member has, you don’t need no stinkin’ experience to run for one of the most powerful positions in the country. Why should you when you can just buy it?

P.S. In the interest of being fair, this is exactly the same reason that I think Ashley Judd’s potential Senate candidacy against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is a big mistake, as well. I prefer my lawmakers to actually have some experience before they rise to the level of governor (unlike Rick Snyder, e.g.) or the U.S. House or Senate. I do love that she’s making McConnell have to actually spend money to campaign, however.

P.P.S. If you’re getting the impression that I think this is all a response to The GOP’s Female Challenge, you’d be absolutely correct.

[Graphic by Anne C. Savage, special to Eclectablog]

The Curse of the Living Romneys

Michigan, a state which had a Romney for governor and then endured over a year’s worth of a man who hasn’t lived here in sixty years telling us he is a Michigander, doesn’t seem to be able wash the Romney kids out of its hair.

First, Slate’s Davie Weigel suggested Mitt Romney as the perfect candidate to be Detroit’s Emergency Financial Manager (EFM). And now Mitt’s older brother Scott Romney is considering a run for Carl Levin’s Senate seat.

Why won’t they leave us alone?

Although he claims he is serious, it’s hard to imagine that Weigel actually believes what he wrote in his piece “Give Detroit to Mitt Romney”:

Why not? Romney’s got a mixed record as a politician, but nobody’s ever questions his skill as a brutal operator and turnaround artist. He’s got a good relationship with Republicans in the state—they even scrapped an electoral vote split plan in 2012 because they wanted him to win! He’s got a larger Rolodex of possible investors than anyone else who might be reasonably expected to take this job.

How about this for a “why not”?: The person that becomes the EFM in Detroit is going to have to form a partnership with the city. He or she will need to work with the elected officials, hopefully get them to help save Detroit from the financial whirlpool that is sucking it down the drain and, eventually, return control over governing the city back over to them. If Weigel or anyone else thinks that Mitt Romney is the man to form that alliance, earn that trust, be that partner, he is completely out of his mind. Romney would be lucky to drive around Detroit without getting his car egged and stoned, much less lead the city back to economic prosperity.

I honestly can’t think of anyone outside of Rick Snyder himself who would be a more adversarial choice for the Detroit EFM.

Scott Romney‘s thoughts about running for Senator Levin’s seat are just another example of a Romney thinking they can buy themselves a government position. Seriously. The dude is 71 and, outside of a few political junkies who can remember the 1998 election where he ran for Attorney General in Michigan, and his clients at Honigman Miller Schwartz & Cohn where he is one of over 180 partners, nobody has even heard of the guy. Yet he’s talking about throwing his hat into the ring with sitting members of Congress and other actual positions of public service that require getting actually … you know … elected.

At least Scott Romney, unlike his brother Mitt, is actually a Michigander. That is at least a step in the right direction, I suppose.

He meant to (not) do that

Remember this horrifying graphic from Mitt Romney’s transition webpage?

Given his complete lack of qualifications for being president and the fact that he was so completely out of touch with most Americans, the very idea of Romney as “president elect” was enough give Democrats heart palpitations.

As it turns out, at least according to the story that’s being spun by Romney’s family and campaign officials, he didn’t really want to run for president anyway. It was something he did because he got talked into it by his son Tagg and his wife Ann.

Just another trophy to add to the shelf. Another item for his curriculum vitae. But not something he really wanted to do.

“He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run,” said Tagg, who worked with his mother, Ann, to persuade his father to seek the presidency. “If he could have found someone else to take his place . . . he would have been ecstatic to step aside. He is a very private person who loves his family deeply and wants to be with them, but he has deep faith in God and he loves his country, but he doesn’t love the attention.”

My first reaction to this was, “Bullshit.” I watched Romney on the campaign trail as closely as anyone who wasn’t actually traveling with him. Mitt Romney is not such a good actor that he could pretend to have a hunger for the presidency that he displayed during the summer and fall of 2012. This dumb statement by Tagg is just their way of saying, “I meant to (not) do that.”

But the more I thought about it and the more Anne I talked about it, the more incensed I became about it. This guy wasn’t in the race to be the President of the United States because he had a heartfelt desire to do it. He was in the race because he got talked into it. He didn’t even see the presidency as ultimate in public service. He saw it as a something akin to being a celebrity. It’s insulting that he would put so much money and effort into to something something this critically important to our country; something he didn’t really want to do in the first place. And, once talked into it, it appears that he saw it mainly as a way to benefit his corporate colleagues at the expense of America’s least fortunate citizens.

In his book The Republic, Plato outlines the perfect society and says that we must choose our leaders from the most talented and gifted and that those people will not want to be leaders. “[T]he State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed,” writes Plato, “And the State in which they are most eager, the worst.”

But Plato also suggested that it was the philosophers — the wisdom-lovers — who should be kings or guardians of society. A faux reluctance like that of Mitt Romney isn’t enough, particularly when his ultimate goal was to enrich those in the upper class that he is a member of.

Ironically, it was Romney’s detachment from the common folks and President Obama’s acute awareness of the importance of talking to everyday Americans that lead to Romney’s embarrassing defeat. This bit from the Boston Globe piece sums it up succinctly:

Tagg Romney could not figure it out. Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries when he had no primary opponent? Only later did Tagg realize this was a key to Obama’s victory.

“We were looking at all the money they were spending in the primary and we were thinking ‘what are they spending all their money on? They’re wasting a lot of money.’ They weren’t. They were paying staffers in Florida” and elsewhere.

If Romney’s Manhattan Project had been debate preparation, then Obama’s was the ground game.

Building on its 2008 field organ­ization, Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the ­Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.

“They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,” said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.

The Obama campaign spent nearly identically to the Romney campaign in the end. But the money they spent was much more often spent on increasing direct, one-to-one voter contact rather than on attack ads and mailers. I spoke to Jeremy Bird, the National Field Director for the Obama, and asked him about the fact that, at least in my local area, the Obama campaign seemed to be doing so much more with fewer people, largely because they had much more involvement by local volunteers. I asked him if they had more or fewer staff people in 2012 compared to 2008.

“We actually have more this year,” Bird told me. “But it’s more accurate to look at it in terms of staff person days rather than the actual numbers of staffers. We put people in place much earlier and got our organization up and running so that we didn’t need as many paid staff people.”

No decision was made about where to put resources that wasn’t firmly backed by data; hard numbers that showed where the need existed and where the best return on an investment of funds could be had. The use of data and metrics by the Obama campaign will go down in history and will be the yardstick by which all future campaigns are measured.

It was the focus on direct, person-to-person contact that was the key to the success of the Obama campaign in both 2008 and 2012. In 2008 it was revolutionary. But, detached from real people and an understanding of what it takes to reach them and convince them, the Romney campaign appeared to learn nothing from the 2008 Obama effort. So, in 2012, they got run over by the Obama voter outreach machine as Jeremy Bird and his staff took it to even higher levels.

In the end, Mitt Romney lost, it appears, because he simply didn’t care enough to win. The fact that someone like that could potentially have been the leader of our country is a bit frightening. But, most importantly, it’s a sad statement about the kind of man Mitt Romney is.

Aw geez, Karl. Just shut the hell up, wouldjya?

Karl Rove (aka “Turdblossom” and “Bush’s Brain”) has figured out how President Barack Obama managed to win re-election this year: Voter suppression.

No, seriously.

GOP strategist Karl Rove went on Fox News today to argue that President Barack Obama “succeeded by suppressing the vote” — an argument that directly contradicts the conventional wisdom that Romney failed to appeal to non-white and female voters.

Rove argued that Obama won with a smaller popular vote and a smaller margin of victory than in the 2008 election against Sen. John McCain. Instead of expanding voters, Rove argued, Obama “suppressed the vote” by demonizing former Gov. Mitt Romney and encouraging people not to vote.

That right there, kids, is Karl Rove redefining the term “voter suppression”. It’s a classic Republican ploy and he’s implementing it right here in front of us in plain sight. Where voter suppression is historically what we call the anti-American Republican tactic of making it harder to vote for people who don’t support you, Rove is now repurposing it to mean “making voters not like your candidate”.

It is, of course, extremely hard to take this failed man seriously. Why do I say “failed”? Because his American Crossroads Super PAC got the desired result where they spent money in exactly 1.29% of the races. The American Crossroads spin-off, Crossroads Global Policy Strategies (“Crossroads GPS”), did a bit better coming in with a return on investment of just over 14%.

In other words, as LOLGOP pointed out recently, Karl Rove has got some schplainin’ to do. And he’s going to have to do that schplainin’ to some extremely rich white people.

Have fun with that, Karl. I’ll pop the popcorn. And, by the way? They are PISSED.

Advisers to Mitt Romney insisted Wednesday that they were surprised by the scale of their loss to President Barack Obama, while big-time GOP donors griped about the campaign’s unflinching confidence in the final stretch.

As results began to stream in Tuesday night, prominent Romney supporters in Boston tried to stay positive, reassuring themselves that there was still a path to the White House. But dejection quickly turned to anger a day after an Electoral College rout that shocked many who had heard self-assured projections about voter enthusiasm and turnout in private conference calls and meetings in the campaign’s final stretch.

“They ran a 20th century campaign in the 21st century,” said one Romney bundler, frustrated that the campaign made assumptions about the youth vote and voter intensity that didn’t pan out. “The anger is that they were entrusted to do certain things. It’s not like they were paid a $5,000 retainer to get a few dozen articles in an inside-the-Beltway paper. This is the major leagues.”

The ironic part about Rove’s new definition of voter suppression is that it seems to demonize attack ads that are designed to make you hate a specific candidate. It’s ironic because American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS ads were negative 92% and 89% of the time, respectively. By the looks of it, I’d say Obama didn’t win due to voter suppression. No, Mitt Romney LOST, with Karl Rove’s help, due voter suppression — voter suppression by Rove’s Super PACs.

You know, if you use Rove’s definition of the phrase.

[CC Facepalm image credit: Cesar Astudillo | Flickr]

America dodged a bullet, folks

I’m just sayin’…

[Images from the Romney-Ryan Inauguration/Transition website]

At least he’s consistent…

You have to hand it to Mitt Romney. While he may not be consistent on his political positions — okay, he’s NOT consistent on his political positions — at least he’s consistent in the fact that he’s willing to brazenly lie to the American people in order to win the Presidency.

His most recent lie — that Jeep is shipping jobs to China — is almost poetic in its hubris. It started with a statement on the campaign trail when it was added to his stump speech. He then doubled down and made a television ad out of it. He then tripled down and made a radio spot and with that one, he included GM as a domestic vehicle manufacturer shipping jobs to China. None of this is true.

And then the stuff hit the fan for Romney.

Both GM and Chrysler executives went through the roof.

Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne rejected an assertion from Romney that Chrysler is planning on moving Jeep production to China.

“I feel obliged to unambiguously restate our position: Jeep production will not be moved from the United States to China,” Marchionne said in an email to employees Tuesday, a copy of which was obtained by The Detroit News.

In fact, he said the company will continue to expand Jeep manufacturing in this country, noting the automaker has added thousands of jobs in the United States to build additional Jeep vehicles.

“Jeep is one of our truly global brands with uniquely American roots. This will never change. So much so that we committed that the iconic Wrangler nameplate, currently produced in our Toledo, Ohio, plant, will never see full production outside the United States,” Marchionne said. “Jeep assembly lines will remain in operation in the United States and will constitute the backbone of the brand. It is inaccurate to suggest anything different.“

Ralph Giles, Vice President of Product Design at Chrysler was even more blunt when Donald Trump amplified Romney’s lie:

@realdonaldtrump you are full of shit!

— Ralph Gilles (@RalphGilles) November 1, 2012

GM got in on the action, too:

“At this stage, we’re looking at Hubble telescope-length distances between campaign ads and reality. GM’s creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country should be a source of bipartisan pride,” GM spokesman Greg Martin said. “We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.”

The headlines have been brutal and the stories even more brutal:

According to a Toledo Blade editorial, “the Re­pub­li­can nom­i­nee is con­duct­ing an ex­er­cise in de­cep­tion about auto-in­dus­try is­sues that is re­mark­able even by the stan­dards of his cam­paign.” The Youngstown Vindicator calls Romney’s ads “an insult to Ohioans” which suggests that Romney “believes the voters of Ohio are not sophisticated enough to separate fact from fiction.” Then there’s the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which uses descriptions like “flailing” and “recklessly” and “masterpiece of misdirection.”

The Obama campaign isn’t letting it go. They released this 30-second television spot that’s being run in Ohio and Michigan:

They also released this longer, 2-minute dismantling of Romney’s egregious lying:

Mitt Romney is finishing big. He’s using Michigan, a state he already kicked in the teeth and betrayed, as a pawn in his game of deceit. He’s disrespecting Ohio voters and Ohio is a state the Romney MUST win to have a chance at the White House.

Thankfully, he’s going out in grand style, sticking to his game plan and telling his biggest lie yet in the waning hours of the 2012 presidential campaign. President Obama and Vice President Biden have been talking about character and credibility a lot lately, reminding voters that you really want a President that you can trust to be honest and forthright.

Mitt Romney has proved that he has neither. Right to the bitter end.

Recently I said I was finally done with these things, but with yet ANOTHER idiotic, offensive statement by a Republican about rape victims the other day, I’ve been turned into Al Pacino in Godfather III*

I therefore present the Republican Rape Advisory Chart…Volume IV.

I’ve also included links to the complete 4-volume set; feel free to use/repost as appropriate, but please upload the image to your own server to keep the bandwidth hit low on mine. I also ask that you keep the “compiled by Brainwrap” text at the bottom.

*(“Just when I thought I was out…they pulled me back in.”)

Volume I
Volume II
Volume III
Volume IV
Volumes I – IV (4 Columns)
Volumes I – IV (Single Column)

REMINDER: Our last two Republican businessman presidents were Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush

Imagine being so full of bullshit that you turn everyone around you into a fact checker—it’s almost like a fable or a Greek myth. But it’s also become our presidential election.

You know the man I’m talking about. The world’s record holder for Politifact Pants-on-Fire awards, the man who said “Of course!” my tax plan ads up then made up new details on the spot, the guy who ran as a progressive and governed as severely conservative… W. Mitt Romney.

During the debates it happened to Candy Crowley, last week it happened to Chrysler, this week it happened to General Motors.

After suggesting that GM was moving American jobs to China, GM spokesman Greg Martin said:

We’ve clearly entered some parallel universe during these last few days. No amount of campaign politics at its cynical worst will diminish our record of creating jobs in the U.S. and repatriating profits back to this country.

Mitt Romney’s definition of truth is whatever helps him close the deal. He’s forever the seventeen-year-old boy talking the neighbor girl into sex—but instead of just wanting your virginity, he wants your Medicaid and Medicare so he can keep 14 percent tax rate.

Plus he’d like to be the most powerful man in the world—which seems to have become his goal since the first time he put on a tie, at some point in his second trimester.

If Mitt Romney ends up losing, there is a poetic justice that he had to spend his last week of his life lying about the auto rescue.

The restructuring and rebirth of the Big Three is a success so evident even Republicans have given up opposing it—now they just try to minimize it or take credit for it.

You remember that Mitt Romney was the only national figure to directly oppose immediate government help for the auto industry—he said that if they got it, they would be gone. He was dead wrong.

Since then he’s twisted and gnarled his positions so many times as his family made millions on a company that held the rescue hostage and exported America jobs to China. His basic argument against the way the president executed the rescue was that workers should have been stripped of more of their retirement, which would have cost the government more anyway.

Now Mitt Romney is suggesting that he has a plan to “save” the auto industry, which reminds me of Gargamel’s plan to “save” the Smurfs.

Romney’s original stance on the auto industry best sums up how his management style meets governing philosophy—investors must be coddled, workers must be punished.

He opposed the bailout in 2008 because it was easy politics and because he saw the financial crisis as a chance to break up the unions that created the middle class in America. The president saved both the industry and the good jobs that go with it—and that’s the difference between these two men.

That a man who told the world, “Corporations are people, my friend,” is now being fact checked by corporations does give you faith in karma.

Now we just need to follow through and make sure that the 99% of America who will be punished if Mitt Romney wins knows what’s at stake.

[Image credit: Donkeyhotey]

Shameless and crass

Mitt Romney claimed to be suspending his campaign during the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy which devastated the East Coast last night and continues to impose its wrath. However, that’s pretty much NOT what he did. Instead, an Ohio campaign event was hurriedly renamed a “relief charity event”. As the event began, the standard Romney bio video was shown on a huge screen. The press was invited, too. As John Aravosis at AMERICAblog points out, why invite the press if this is for charity???

Somebody forgot to change the sign on the door:

Sign at the Romney storm relief event in Kettering Ohio this AM. twitter.com/mikiebarb/stat…

— Michael Barbaro (@mikiebarb) October 30, 2012

The press passes still called it a “Victory Rally”:

Press badge for today’s “storm relief event” in Ohio: twitter.com/Ari_Shapiro/st…

— Ari Shapiro (@Ari_Shapiro) October 30, 2012

Inside, attendees’ donations of canned goods were assembled into a nice photo op for the multimillionaire.

Ryan staff and supporters arranging goods for a photo op

— Zeke Miller (@ZekeJMiller) October 30, 2012

So, without putting too fine a point on it, while President Obama coordinated the efforts of relief agencies including FEMA, Mitt Romney was staging a campaign event in a crucial swing state that was meant to look like he was “doing something”. The problem is, what is needed isn’t canned goods. It’s money.

Red Cross tells us grateful for Romney donation but prefer people send money or donate blood dont collect goods NOT best way to help #Sandy

— Andrea Mitchell (@mitchellreports) October 30, 2012

A man worth upwards of $250 million (that we know about) made a big show of sending donations of things given by others when what is really needed is cash donations. (The Red Cross can make a dollar go WAY farther than the average American can at the grocery store.)

What next? #AnnRomney organizes bake sale to raise money for hurricane victims of #Sandy #P2

— Anne C. Savage (@Anne_Savage) October 30, 2012

Ben White from Politico was pretty direct about it:

Romney is doing a “storm relief” event in Ohio? Why not come to NYC and give us a hand.

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) October 30, 2012

Fine by me if candidates want to go back to campaigning, just patronizing to pretend it’s something else.

— Ben White (@morningmoneyben) October 30, 2012

With this, Mitt Romney has effectively earned himself Scumbag Steve status:

It’s worth noting that, during the Republican primary, Mitt Romney suggested doing away with FEMA.

When asked about that today, he ignored reporters’ questions. 14 times.

In other Republican Fail news, the Gothamist ran a piece today with a title that could be off the pages of The Onion: “Bush’s FEMA Director, Michael Brown, Criticizes Obama for Responding to Sandy Too Quickly”.

Republicans have really left town for Surrealville, haven’t they? Or may Crasshypocrisytown…

Derp

This must-see video is must-see because it’s never NOT funny to watch a visibly wasted Meatloaf slaughter a patriotic American anthem with his arm draped around Mitt Romney’s neck. It happened at a campaign stop in Ohio last week when Mitt was joined onstage by country musicians Randy Owens, John Rich and Big Kenny along with Meatloaf.

Enjoy (and I do mean enjoy):

That’s “America the Beautiful”, by the way. You know, in case you didn’t recognize it. I don’t know who the guy on the left is but he’s barely an improvement over Meatloaf.

This is a great metaphor for Mitt Romney’s campaign. I’m sure it is. I’d tell you what it is but I can’t stop LMAO long enough to work it out.

Thank you, Meatloaf. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you. That should just about cinch the Ohio vote, you bet.

[CC photo credit: BJ Bumgarner | Flickr]