Who cares at this point?
This is filler, folks.
"GOP guarded over possible Romney run; Support among voters, within party questioned" by Matt Viser, Globe Staff January 16, 2015
CORONADO, Calif. — Mitt Romney’s potential presidential candidacy was being met with curiosity and wariness — but far from a full-fledged embrace — by Republican power brokers and activists gathering Thursday in California for the party’s winter meetings.
The candidacy injects the possibility of a hotly competitive primary that could either energize the party, or distract voters from the ultimate goal of winning in November 2016. While Romney and former Florida governor Jeb Bush have attracted most of the early attention, nearly two dozen candidates are now considering a run.
And I don't like any of them, not one, in either party.
“This really kind of throws a wrench in everything,” said Saul Anuzis, a longtime Michigan Republican leader who backed Romney in 2012. “Mitt Romney is truly respected and loved here. No doubt the committee has a great deal of positive feelings for him. But I also think everybody’s kind of surprised.’’
In conversations with more than a dozen Republicans gathered near San Diego for the Republican National Committee’s winter meetings, most said Romney’s potential candidacy demonstrates the party’s vibrancy, even while they cautioned that he would need to mount a much better effort than he did in 2012.
Some of Romney’s potential rivals and the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page dismissed Romney this week as “yesterday’s news’’ and “recycled,” saying the same thing that Romney himself has said for the last two years: He had his shot, and now it’s someone else’s turn.
“I’m not happy frankly with the way he’s chosen to reenter presidential politics and I think his friends need to be honest with him about that,” Vin Weber, a former cochairman of Romney’s campaign, told Bloomberg Politics. “He’s a great man, he’d be a great president but there’s not a lot of precedent for somebody losing the election and coming back four years later, becoming the nominee.”
As Romney continues to weigh whether to run again, one of his biggest tests is whether he can convince the broader party faithful that he deserves another shot at the White House.
While his most ardent supporters and most loyal donors are nudging him into the race, it is an open question how deep the support will be in his party.
There is almost universal agreement that no one is going to step aside for him and that Romney has a more difficult path to the nomination than he did in 2012, particularly with Bush strongly contemplating a campaign and already competing with Romney for donors.
Related: Past, Present, and Future Presidents
I didn't see Mitt in there.
There also appeared to be a consensus that Romney, who trumpeted his business management skills on the stump, oversaw a poorly run general election campaign that allowed President Obama to return to the White House.
RNC members said he will be under pressure to explain what lessons he learned and how he will improve if he runs again.
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“Governor Romney is one of the finest public servants this country has ever known,” said Robert Asher, an RNC committeeman from Pennsylvania. “There’s an old saying: In politics, 24 hours is a lifetime. People are allowed to change their mind.”
Reince Priebus, the RNC’s chairman, strolled around the resort Thursday with an entourage and a broad smile.
“It’s going to be a lot of fun,” he said in an interview. “It makes our party the exciting, interesting party that has intrigue, a little drama. But a lot of fun.
“The Democrats, what do they have?” he added. “It’s the most boring, day old bread, same old, same old.”
Still, there are some concerns that a Romney candidacy — or one by Bush — will have the feel of same old, same old, as well.
They are all $ame old $ame old because they can't risk anyone who will turn against the pedophile perverts that make up the $cum political cla$$ and their elite ma$ters, nor can they risk someone who may expose all the secrets.
“Some of the newer candidates say, ‘We need to look forward not back,’ ” Duprey said. “We need to do to Secretary [of State Hillary] Clinton what President Obama did to John McCain, play the generational change.”
I don't see anything out there.
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Related: Presidential Kingmaker
Did you check the poll numbers?
Mitt Romney makes case for possible third run
Globe had to rewrite the whole argument so f*** 'em.
"Themes hint at reengineered Mitt Romney" by Matt Viser, Globe Staff January 23, 2015
WASHINGTON — The politician on the stage talked about the “human tragedy” of middle-class people struggling to make ends meet. He lamented income inequality, saying “People want to see rising wages — and they deserve them. They’re working hard.”
Then, winding up a 15-minute speech to loud applause, he vowed, “We’re going to . . . finally end the scourge of poverty in this great land!”
The lines could have easily been delivered by President Obama or Senator Elizabeth Warren.
But they came from the mouth of Republican Mitt Romney, who is undergoing another reinvention as he considers whether to mount a third presidential campaign.
As he tests the waters, Romney has at times sounded like a Democrat, suggesting that fighting poverty would be a core tenet of his candidacy. He has advocated higher teacher pay, said more needs to be done to fight global climate change, and reinforced his previous call for a higher minimum wage.
He finally smelled the fart mist, huh?
(The blog editor has decided the $hit-fooley $how and political illu$ions are so absurd they are no longer worth filling up on -- especially when they are so irrelevant at this point in time)
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To his supporters, it is a heartfelt way for Romney to address publicly some of the issues he has been passionate about privately, dating back to his years working as a Mormon pastor.
He just lost the Republican primary.
But to his critics, this is just the latest Etch A Sketch moment for a candidate who, perpetually in search of a pathway to the presidency, picks his positions strategically, rather than out of any firm conviction.
He ran as a moderate in Massachusetts — first unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 1994 and then successfully for governor in 2002 — before changing his positions on topics such as abortion in an apparent effort to appeal to national Republicans.
Yeah, odd result, a Utah Mormon winning over an Irish Democrat in Massachusetts.
Of course, who could ever question the veracity of AmeriKa's electronic ballot boxes and optical scanners, 'eh?
By 2012, the man who a decade earlier said he was “someone who is moderate” whose “views are progressive,” was declaring himself “severely conservative.”
He’s now back on a softer note.
“A successful presidential campaign message relies on the credibility of the messenger, and on this topic Romney has zero credibility,” said Rick Tyler, a Republican consultant who formerly advised Newt Gingrich and led a firm that has worked with other conservative candidates, including Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, but is so far unaligned.
It's okay: the AmeriKan media is having the same crisis.
“Romney is now immune from the flip-flop charge because he’s changes so much you can’t tell which side of the flip or the flop he’s on,” said Tyler. “The problem with Romney is he doesn’t hold any core convictions, or at least any anyone could articulate.”
Romney’s spokesman declined to comment, and other aides declined to comment on the record.
In the two weeks since Romney told a group of donors that he was considering another run, Republicans have begun to question his focus on poverty, recalling that he was tagged as a wealthy businessman during his 2012 campaign after he was caught on a video disparaging 47 percent of Americans who depend on government assistance.
Oh, the HYPOCRI$Y a LITTLE MUCH, is it?
Democrats are eager to use some of the same lines of attack, with plenty of old footage to recycle.
I was feeling like I had seen all this before.
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Romney has been ridiculed by conservative pundits as the wrong messenger.
“Until Romney’s expression of interest in a third run for the presidency, when has he ever shown an interest in the poor?” Jennifer Rubin, a conservative commentator at the Washington Post who was once one of Romney’s chief advocates, wrote this week. “When has he departed from the view that cutting marginal tax rates would create the tide that raises all boats?”
Republicans, she said, should nominate someone new who can forcefully articulate ways to empower middle-class families.
“Whomever it comes from it must be authentic and come from someone with a record of doing what the candidate says he believes in,” she wrote. “It can’t come from a candidate who discovered the poor a few weeks ago.”
In recent days, Romney has not provided specific proposals for fighting poverty, raising wages, or combating climate change, but the mere fact that he is talking about the subjects is getting attention.
Who decides that, and what if everyone ignored him?
“I’m one of those Republicans who thinks we are getting warmer and that we contribute to that,” Romney said Wednesday night during an investment management conference in Utah.
Where it is freezing cold outside.
How did he get there, anyway, and what's the carbon footprint on that?
It’s a similar stance that he held early on during the 2012 campaign, but one that bucks many in his party and never became a core component of his candidacy.
Romney first revealed Jan. 9 that he was considering a run in a private meeting with wealthy donors in midtown Manhattan. He followed that with his first public comments relating to a potential run last Friday, at a Republican National Committee meeting in San Diego.
“Under President Obama the rich have gotten richer, income inequality has gotten worse, and there are more people in poverty in America than ever before,” Romney told the crowd of party insiders and campaign contributors in San Diego.
Yeah, thanks to guys like you, too. Sorry, guys, but we $ee through the fal$e debate now. You guys dance to money and Israel. That's it.
Romney has previously written about poverty, in his 2010 book “No Apology,” released in the lead-up to his 2012 campaign.
Something he has never experienced. I have. I am.
“Far too many American families live below the poverty line, and many more live with worry and insecurity,” he wrote. “Racial minorities especially have not shared equally in the nation’s economic success, and there is a growing gap between the highest-earning households and the lowest.”
But during his 2012 campaign, he did not emphasize poverty. When he did mention it, it was to extol the virtues of the free-enterprise system — not government intervention — in pulling people up the economic ladder.
The very one that made him extremely wealthy and part of the 1% that has benefited so much. Where ya' been, Mitt? Wealth inequality gets worse every second, minute, hour, day.
“Free enterprise has done more to lift people out of poverty, to help build a strong middle class, to help educate our kids, and to make our lives better than all the programs of government combined,” he said in a stump speech in April 2012.
Government intervention seems more on his mind now. During an event in Indian Wells, Calif., on Monday night, Romney turned his attention to boosting teacher pay.
“We have great teachers. I’d pay them more,” Romney said, according to the Desert Sun newspaper.
Where you been, and are they that great anymore? Or is it just spew myths and pander to get elected?
After his 2012 loss, Romney came out in favor of raising the minimum wage, breaking from many in his party and distinguishing himself from some leading contenders in the 2016 presidential field.
Chump change for the poor, and why didn't you raise it as governor?
Related:
"In July 2006, the legislature passed a bill increasing the minimum wage to $8.00 an hour, and he vetoed it."
MITT!
But even then, he cast it not in moral terms but as a tactical stance, required to attract support among Hispanic voters....
The cultish religious $cum will never have my support. He never has. I have never voted for Mitt Romney, and never will. I'll vote for Satan himself before I vote for Romney.
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Also see:
"The meeting, first reported by The New York Times, raises the obvious question"
Not with me.
The political economy in this country is as bankrupt as its fiscal economy at this point.
At least some $hitty little scribe at the BG gets to keep his job covering the illu$ion of politics.
