Mitt is gone but not forgotten. The Republican candidate who failed in his bid for the presidency told a group of major contributors on Friday he, “Lost, but is not going away!” He told the gathering he has no ambition for political office,
but has every intention of supporting GOP gubernatorial candidates and various contenders for the 2016 presidency.
He won’t be running for anything, again. Is that good news or bad? While most considered his loss to Barack Obama to have been by a substantial margin, if we consider the campaign the former governor from Massachusetts ran, we may say he came in a darn close second.
If you are a Romney fan, you might stop reading. Because in my view, the man, who none would ever call a visionary, or even an academic, considered his greatest asset to have been that, on one occasion, he was president of an Olympic organizing committee. He repeated that mantra over, and over, and over…
We suspect much of Romney’s support that almost won came from middle U.S. evangelicals and from the very wealthy, who saw an opportunity to turn a hefty profit merely by being cold, and callous. Remember, "Forty seven percent of the people who are dependent on government, and believe they are victims. … believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it.
Here is a man with untold offshore wealth, who specializes in making a profit by taking over businesses then declaring bankruptcy, and who says things such as:
Corporations are people, my friend ... of course they are. Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to the people. Where do you think it goes? Whose pockets? Whose pockets? People's pockets! Human beings, my friend!
Yes I know this is old news, and I’m closing in on tacky, but the same man who tossed off, “I like to fire people!” is less well remembered for this ditty in September of 2012:
When you have a fire in an aircraft, there's no place to go, exactly, there's no --- and you can't find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft --- because the windows won't open. I don't know why they don't do that. It's a real problem.
So the next time you find yourself in a plane afire, just open a window. Why didn’t I think of that?
Article comments
1 - Baronius
I count five anecdotes/quotes in this article.
1) The 47%. He was asked about what voters he can reach, and replied that 47% were beyond his reach. Every campaign leaves large groups uncontested.
2) Corporations. He was saying that corporations are people, not in a legal sense (which can be debated), but in the sense that they're composed of people. Shouldn't you be happy that a one-percenter thinks about the impact that corporations have on people's lives?
3) Windows on a plane. It was a joke.
4) The next president. It was a slip-up.
5) Concerned about the poor. Here's the quote I found: "I’m in this race because I care about Americans. I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation."
Now, if you were saying that you're happy that Mitt is going to be out campaigning, I could understand it. He says a lot of clumsy things. But you're saying that you're happy he's not running for anything, which implies that your problem is with his policies, not his lumpier statements. Where in this article do you address his policies?
2 - John Lake
I can't address his policies; by the time my comments are published, they have all changed.
But seriously, Romney and his advisors put very little thought into the recent campaign. They used the dusty, mildewed and worn guide from the fifties, and counted on their ability to deceive. They took both sides of every issue. They never took into account the Internet armed neo-savvy in the electorate.
3 - Baronius
If you believe that, why didn't you argue it (with specifics and references) in the article? Instead you took a bunch of cheap shots. By doing so you made your side look no better than the right-wing hack who makes everything about candidate Obama's 57 states. Internet-savvy people can find out-of-context comments and gaffes all day. So what. State your case.
4 - John Lake
I made some relevant and documented comments about the Republican campaign prior to the election. Their strategy is based on semi-true personal attacks and half-quotes, aimed at the constituency that trusts that they are telling the truth. They never tire of berating the president, deeming him a 'failure' in what seems to many as thinly veiled racial context. In the event Romney (or Ryan) runs for anything in the coming years, I will take the time to be more specific.
5 - Dr Dreadful
This is a rather "blah" effort, to be frank. At least John's articles usually have something to sink one's teeth into, but this is a bit like mocking an NFL team in January for a poor performance in week 2 of the season. It's old.
Perhaps we can expect an attack piece on Bob Dole next?
6 - Baronius
This article is like mocking an NFL team in January for what you heard the uniforms looked like in a Week 2 game you didn't see. Then again, we're down to, what, three writers on this site, so I guess we can't be fussy. The guy who rips off the Weekly Standard got shoved down the memory hole, and the guy who quotes the North Korean news agency as an objective source stays.
7 - Igor
IMO Romney was a poor candidate from the beginning. He was the scion of a wealthy influential family and displayed the hu bris you'd expect from that. His business background was very thin, being confined to liquidation companies to recover their salvage value. He never took a product and brought it to market, fought for it, sold it, built it, etc. He made his fortune converting an old-fashioned business consultant, Bain Capital, living on yearly revenues, into a leveraged-buyout operation holding billions of it's own capital. To do that he probably used cash from Salvadoran criminals, which may have come back to haunt him as president.
IMO his business experience was shallow and poor quality.
I wondered: as president facing an economic calamity his experience would lead him to liquidate the USA and send the proceeds to the shareholders.
8 - Baronius
Clavos is right that you make a surprisingly high number of negative comments about business.
9 - Igor
And why not? For the past 30 years 'business' has advocated, elected, connived and schemed for ever more power, laying waste to public facilities all the while.
And business has gotten power and wealth to an unprecedented degree.
If they made a mess of things, as appears likely, they best take responsibility for it and reform.
And I say that as a lifelong businessman!
Business has had every opportunity in the America of the past 30 years and they've screwed up. NONE of the promise of the 70's republicans have been delivered. We do NOT have peace abroad. We do NOT have healthycare for all. We do not have a sound economic system that people can plan on and depend on.
Business has all the power. Business has all the money. And they screwed up big!
10 - Glenn Contrarian
Baronius -
Those who work in business share a crucial trait with those who work in government - they're all human...which means they are given to all the same foibles. The difference lay in that while those in business - at least at lower levels - are easier to fire, they also have significantly less ethical oversight, particularly from the press.