Tag Archives: mitt romney

Say what now?

Obama 2012By now I’m sure you’ve heard about the video that shook the pillars of the Mitt Romney campaign. If you haven’t, there are plenty of places to find out about it. Just search for “mitt romney 47%” and you’ll find more than you ever hoped to. If there’s ever been a single moment in this campaign that has been more scrutinized than this one, I don’t know what it was.

For those who don’t want to put forth the effort to read Romney’s words for yourself, I will repeat them here. Caught on a hidden-camera video at a fundraiser with wealthy businessmen, Romney said this:

“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. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

Now, I don’t make a habit of calling people a-holes, but Romney comes off like a serious a-hole with this comment. Not only does he grossly misrepresent the people who pay no income tax, but he completely writes them off as unworthy of his attention. According to him, the staggeringly poor, the elderly living on a fixed income, veterans and students are all part of a left-wing cabal seeking to cheat real Americans out of their due as citizens. I can’t even begin to tell you how much BS that is. Suffice it to say that it’s a lot of BS.

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And so it begins in earnest.

Obama 2012Well, it’s happened: Mitt Romney has chosen his running mate and now we can get down to the nitty gritty of campaign back and forth. The VP pick is Paul Ryan, author of the infamous budget House Republicans have tried to pass twice, and general creep. For some reason media outlets keep playing him up as a charming fellow, but there’s nothing charming about a guy who, at an invitation-only “town hall meeting” made jokes about a 71-year-old man being forced to the ground by police for the outrageous crime of speaking his mind.

I suspect that, as is the case with Romney, the more voters get to know Ryan the less they’re going to like him. A poll taken right after his selection indicated that most voters don’t even know who Ryan is. This is unfortunate, as this means the electorate hasn’t been paying attention at all to the wild-eyed right-wing agenda being pushed in the House since 2010. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, but the general ignorance of voters never fails to shock me.

There’s some sign that people are starting to take notice of what a jerk Mitt Romney is. His favorable/unfavorable ratings are trending the wrong way for him and in recent polls Obama has begun to pull away. For a while there it seemed like we’d be in a statistical dead heat until November, but things are not developing in Romney’s favor.

I’m sure Romney hopes that by picking such a right-wing ideologue as his running mate, Republicans will get excited and want to vote, but I think he’s miscalculated. Republicans were already excited and ready to vote simply because they want the evil, black secret Muslim communist out of office. Yes, they’re going to be over the moon with poster boy Ryan bolstering the ticket, but there’s not a single undecided or independent voter who’s going to say, “You know what? I wasn’t going to vote for Romney before, but now that he’s got that guy who wants to end Medicare on the ticket, I’m going to go for it.” If anything, they’ll be turned away.

The race isn’t over. Obama is going to have to stay on the offensive all the way through election day, educating voters about exactly what Romney and Ryan stand for. The right-wing noise machine has been squawking about Obama’s negativity in this cycle, but the truth is that Obama can’t afford to play nicey-nice when he’s being painted as one step removed from the Antichrist by the opposition. It’s pretty clear by this point that any good Obama has done makes negligible impact on voting trends, so his only hope is if voters begin to understand what a disaster-in-waiting the Romney/Ryan ticket represents. It’s a sad commentary on the state of our politics, to be sure.

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