Tag: Mitt Romney

Another good day for Mitt Romney

Now that South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s national ambitions are a thing of the past — left behind on the extreme southern stretch of the Appalachian Trail — it’s interesting to think about the number of up-and-coming Republican stars who’ve been taken off the board in the past year. Five (including Sanford) come quickly to mind.

Two — Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — were damaged by their own party, pushed in front of the public long before they were ready. Hype-versus-reality questions aside, Palin and Jindal were routinely described as rising stars until, suddenly, they weren’t.

Jindal can certainly recover from his poor performance in delivering the Republican response to President Obama’s national address last February. All he has to do is not act like a dork the next time. But the arc of Palin’s post-running-mate political career has already been determined: hero to the right wing of her party; pariah to everyone else.

Sanford’s finished. So is Nevada Sen. John Ensign, although at least his sexual indiscretions do not include a secretive flight to Argentina. I must confess I’d barely heard of Ensign before learning that (1) he’d been unfaithful in his marriage and (2) he was a possible presidential candidate.

Finally, there is former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, chosen by Obama as his ambassador to China. Huntsman hasn’t been tainted (except possibly in the eyes of a few partisan Republicans), but he’s not going to challenge Obama in 2012.

As Rich Lowry observes at National Review (via Talking Points Memo), Mitt Romney may be the last candidate standing by the time the ’12 campaign rolls around in earnest.

More on the Palins and the AIP

John McCain’s campaign staffers are pushing back hard on Jake Tapper’s ABC News report that Sarah Palin had once been a member of the Alaskan Independence Party (AIP), which tells you all you need to know about how toxic they fear this issue will become.

Kate Klonick, writing for TPM Muckraker, has now verified that Todd Palin was a member from 1995 through 2002. What’s still hanging out there is this: the McCain camp also denies that Sarah Palin attended the party’s state convention in Wasilla in 1994 — but Tapper’s got three on-the-record witnesses who say they saw her there.

And so it continues.

Media Nation was talking a little while ago with a friend whom I would describe as slightly right of center and deeply versed in foreign-policy issues. He probably would have voted for McCain if he had chosen Joe Lieberman or, for instance, Condoleezza Rice. Mitt Romney? Maybe.

The Palin choice, though, has driven him into the Obama camp for two reasons: his fear of what would happen if she became president; and what it says about McCain’s judgment.

Spinning the obvious

In an “analysis” headlined “Biden pick shows lack of confidence,” Ron Fournier of the Associated Press writes:

For all his self-confidence, the 47-year-old Illinois senator worried that he couldn’t beat Republican John McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Biden selection is the next logistical step in an Obama campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

That’s because, well, Obama probably can’t beat McCain without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack.

Let me lend a hand and help Fournier with what he may be writing one week from today:

For all his self-confidence, the 72-year-old Arizona senator worried that he couldn’t beat Democrat Barack Obama without help from a seasoned politician willing to attack. The Romney selection is the next logistical step in a McCain campaign that has become more negative — a strategic decision that may be necessary but threatens to run counter to his image.

Any questions? Other than wondering how many brain cells Fournier fired up before putting fingers to keyboard?

David Brooks on Friday: “Biden’s the one. The only question is whether Obama was wise and self-aware enough to know that.”

The feeding frenzy is under way

The John McCain story has led to the media-ethics feeding frenzy of 2008. We’re going to know a lot more in a few days. Right now, we should just hang on. Still, I can’t resist posting a few tidbits.

The New Republic’s backgrounder, by Gabriel Sherman, is a must-read. It seems possible — even probable — that it was Sherman’s nosing-around that finally led the New York Times into running what it had. Bill Keller sounds really steamed. I’d love to hear a recording of him sarcastically spitting out the phrase “special correspondent.” Except that it was in an e-mail.

I and others have already speculated how miffed Mitt Romney must be that the Times waited until after McCain had all but wrapped up the nomination before dropping its bombshell. Well, Charles Kaiser of Radar now says one of the Times’ tipsters was former congressman Vin Weber, who just so happened to have been an official with the Romney campaign. Weber has denied it, but Kaiser’s not taking it back. So who knows?

Adam Reilly points out that the Boston Globe chose to run the Washington Post’s version rather than the Times’ more incendiary (i.e., sex rumors included played up) story, even though the Globe is owned by the New York Times Co. Interesting. But last night, I noticed that there was a link to the Times story featured prominently on the home page of the Globe’s Boston.com site.

Finally, no offense to Ryan Lizza, but I don’t think I’m going to get around to reading his New Yorker article on whether McCain can remake the Republican Party. Talk about bad timing.

File photo of Cindy and John McCain (cc) by Chris Dunn and republished here under a Creative Commons license. Some rights reserved.

Making sense of the McCain story

Josh Marshall, fresh off his Polk Award, does a good job of putting into perspective today’s New York Times story on John McCain, which suggests, without quite saying out loud, that he may have had an affair with a lobbyist for whom he did favors during his 2000 “straight talk” campaign.

Word is that the McCain campaign tried to spike this story back in December. At Salon, Alex Koppelman recalls that it made a brief appearance on Drudge around that time, then went underground. Is it a legitimate story? Marshall thinks so, but hedges his bets:

I find it very difficult to believe that the Times would have put their chin so far out on this story if they didn’t know a lot more than they felt they could put in the article, at least on the first go. But in a decade of doing this, I’ve learned not to give any benefits of the doubt, even to the most esteemed institutions.

If this has legs, Mitt Romney clearly has plenty to howl about. It would have been the story of the campaign. Then again, Romney has merely “suspended” his campaign, hasn’t he?

Not that this can be compared to the Times’ mind-blowing decision to hold its story on the Bush administration’s no-warrant wiretapping program for more than a year, until after the 2004 presidential election. That still stands as some sort of record.

More: The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz offers some context.

Still more: Adam Reilly notes that Sam Stein hit the Romney angle last night. OK, let me try for something else original: Is this bad news for Hillary Clinton or what? For her to have any chance of staging a comeback in Texas and Ohio, she’s got to (a) get the media to subject Barack Obama to a raking-over of epic proportions and then (b) hope something turns up. Right now, thanks to the Times, (a) looks pretty unlikely.

Romney’s timely end

Mitt Romney has been justly criticized for moving far to the right on a whole range of issues in order to pander to conservatives in the presidential campaign. What hasn’t been noted often enough, though, is that Romney never stopped shape-shifting, adopting a range of different personas in order to suit the state of the week. Peter Canellos gets at it nicely in today’s Globe:

In the end, all those inconsistencies combined with a somewhat plastic presence on the stump made Romney seem inauthentic and opportunistic — a meat-and-potatoes car guy in Michigan who morphed into a Pollo Tropico lover in Florida.

Romney furthered those impressions by changing his emphasis in state after state, from being a social conservative in Iowa, to an anti-Washington crusader in New Hampshire, to an economic nationalist in Michigan, to the one true Reaganite who played to right-wing talk shows in the days leading up to Super Tuesday.

By the time Romney took the stage in Boston on Tuesday night, wearing the frozen smile of a politician desperate to stave off defeat, his message had unraveled into a series of generic platitudes and warnings.

Also in the Globe, Joan Vennochi mocked Romney effectively yesterday, and Scot Lehigh comes back with more today.

In the Herald, Peter Gelzinis is on fire:

Mitt Romney’s quest for the White house dissolved under the weight of some very expensive brainwashing by a circle of consultants who sold him on the ludicrous notion that he could become president by running to the right of a genuine war hero.

That would’ve been a tough sell even if Mitt had spent 13 months in Vietnam, rather than two years searching for Mormon converts in the Bordeaux region of France.

But then, when you subscribe to the world according to Rush Limbaugh — the OxyContin-popping Charles Foster Kane of talk radio who bloviates his conservative rant from behind the locked gates of his Florida compound — you’ve already lost touch with a large part of reality.

Personally, I think Republican voters took the measure of Romney’s character and found it lacking. Even by the debased standards of politics, Romney was unusual in his willingness to say anything in order to get elected. Too bad he didn’t realize that’s not the way to get elected.

As Republican political consultant Todd Domke said on WBUR Radio yesterday, if Romney were the person whom he claimed to be, he’d be sailing to the nomination right now.

Further thoughts from the Outraged Liberal, himself a recovering journalist.

Channeling the same wavelength: A Globe editorial refers to Romney’s “shape-shifting,” too.

Photo (cc) by Tim Somero. Some rights reserved.

No surprises in Mass.

No live blogging tonight, except to observe that rumors of Hillary Clinton’s and Mitt Romney’s demise in Massachusetts were greatly exaggerated. My record of making predictions is pretty grim, but I’ll give myself a mild pat on the back for this. I’ll have further thoughts on the media and Super Tuesday in the Guardian tomorrow afternoon.