Friday, June 14, 2013

Mitt Romney: Of Hurricanes and Ground Games and the Arrogance of a Fool in Denial

by Sunnyjane

I did not have sex with that papaya! *
Mitt's back.  Yay.  With hubby-hand-holder Ann. Oh goody.  Sadly, neither has gained a scrap of insight into the real reasons why Americans went to the polls and re-elected President Obama last November.  See, even Pat Robertson promised the Romneys that God said Mitt would win and serve two terms, and when you've got both Karl Rove's polls and God on your side, what could go wrong?  We know all about Rove's polls, but perhaps God was just having the Romneys on a bit, because Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, and Michelle Bachmann all proclaimed that God had told them to run for president in 2012.  Haven't we talked about keeping religion out of politics?  Yeah, I thought we had.

*In an interview with Miami’s most prominent Cuban-exile station during the 2012 campaign, Romney informed his hosts that he loves Cuban fruits and is a big fan of papaya.  Papaya is Cuban slang for, um, vagina.

Here We Go -- Again  


Like another former governor we could name, Mitt Romney has obviously not been perusing any of them, all of them reading materials during his self-imposed exile in one of his many homes.  Perhaps when he and Ann are not shopping at Costco, he's been spending his days building a new house in Utah or doing something or other to the house in La Jolla.  I dunno.  But had he paid any attention at all to the gazillion postmortems of his failed campaign -- including from his own party -- he would have had some inkling as to why he is not referred to today as President Romney.

And it's as simple as this: 


Moving Forward to the Past

Mitt is extraordinarily disappointed in President Obama's second term performance, so he's inserting himself back into the political arena to help shape national priorities.  Well, that's certainly a relief!  I mean, the stock market is at an all-time high and unemployment is going down, so certainly the nation needs his expertise.  Oh wait...

No, what the flip-flopper is hot on right now is helping the GOP with their Latino problem.  Well, who else could stop the Republicans from spewing the verbal diarrhea of their racism but their 2012 candidate?  Sure, he insisted on continually calling undocumented immigrants illegals and recommending that they self-deport and get in line in their own countries, but...

Although he was asked many times to state his policy ideas for immigration reform, he consistently hedged, at one point telling a Latino group that I will put in place my own long-term solution that will replace and supersede the president's temporary measure.  From the results of the election, it seems that the attendees were not particularly impressed with that illuminating revelation.

No Fair!  Obama Was Being Presidential!




Pandering to the smaller-government faction of the Republican Party has rarely worked out very well.  During one of the endless Republican primary debates of 2012, Romney answered Absolutely when asked if disaster relief should be transferred to each individual state and added:  Every time you have an occasion to take something from the federal government and send it back to the states, that’s the right direction.

Still unable to acknowledge that it was his -- and his party's -- policies that turned the majority of Americans toward the Democratic candidate in 2012, Romney's has recently emerged to whinge about the reasons for his loss.  Of the several excuses he's given lately, what may be the most massive and destructive hurricane in our history arrived one week before the election and that haunts him still.  

It's not quite fair to say that Romney believes in the Alex Jones bullshit conspiracy theory that the government (read: Obama) has a weather disaster weapon, but it may have crossed his mind.  No, Mitt's beef is two-fold: #1, the hurricane came at a bad time for his campaign; and #2, the fact that FEMA is a big-government program allowed President Obama to fly into the affected states -- New Jersey and New York -- and act all, uh, presidentially.  So Mr. Romney learned a good lesson: be careful what you wish for; next time it may be a Republican president who has to be presidential during a natural disaster.

And what was the GOP candidate doing during this crisis?  He was soliciting canned goods and clothing for the victims, which were not needed or wanted.  The Red Cross was asking for cash, a commodity Romney certainly understands but one which he is always reluctant to hand over.  It never occurred to him to call the White House and say, Mr. President, what can my campaign and I do to help the people affected by this terrible disaster?  That would have made him appear presidential, at least to a small degree.  Mitt Romney simply has all the wrong instincts when it comes to political leadership.

Experts and Enthusiasts Conference -- What?


 Wanna kill some innocent skeet with Rand Paul?  Play putt-putt with Paul Ryan?  Split a two-foot hoagie with Chris Christie?  Sorry, you missed your chance.  Maybe next year.

But that's what potential puppets and puppeteers were doing at Romney's second-act shindig in Utah earlier this week.  For $5,000 you could have spent three days listening to Mitt tell attendees that they had to become less partisan and develop strategies for 2016.  And there was that Latino thingy, too, as you remember.  Well, telling Paul and Ryan to become less partisan is pretty much like telling a dog in heat to practice abstinence-only in her social life.    

Since it was a private conference, no media was allowed to report on it.  As a result, there's no indication on which of the Obama Administration's policies Romney was advocating for.  Healthcare?  Immigration?  Gun reform.  Yeah...riiiight.

But the conference was also an opportunity for two hundred Republican donors to take a look at what may well be shaping up to lead the ticket in 2016.  I'm not sure which were the experts and which were the enthusiasts in this crowd, but it sounded much like giving two hundred wealthy donors an opportunity to choose which loser they would throw money away on come the next general election.

And although not one of them has solicited my advice, I have some...  

End Note



...Make sure you offer Republican  voters a better choice than was presented to them in 2012.

You're welcome.

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