Monday, January 9, 2012

One Day Until New Hampshire and Citizen Bain

++Citizen Bain or Willard Romney appears en route to a shaky victory in the Live Free or Die state. The last PPP poll has Romney at 35%, Paul at 18% and Jon Huntsman at 16% with a bullet. The only one who has significantly moved is Huntsman because of yesterday's debate performance. Romney underperforms so expect him to dip to 32% about the same as he did last time.

++Citizen Bain got off to a rough Monday morning with a speech to the Nashua Chamber of Commerce where he won the hearts and minds of people, saying,"I like to be able to fire people." Only yesterday he told a crowd that he knew what it was like to fear being fired. He had been afraid of being fired at Bain, where he was the CEO, not an employee.

++Sunday saw the entire Republican field dissect and destroy Romney's character. By the end , his reputation as governor, as businessman and as a non-politician lay in tatters. In addition, his slam at Jon Huntsman serving as ambassador to China for President Obama boom-a-ranged on him as Romney said serving the conservative agenda and the Republican Party was serving the country better than being an ambassador for Barack Obama. Huntsman handled this perfectly addressing himself to the audience and saying that he would always serve the country first. And he coyly got in a dig at Romney by mentioning his sons who are serving in the armed forces. Romney's sons studiously ignored the military for a life in business.

++Willard also related the story his father told him that he should not run for office if he needed a paycheck and he had a mortgage. Good advice but it was delivered as if only the rich should run for office.

++Newt Gingrich got Romney when Willard started talking about how he didn't want to run for President, that he ran for governor and achieved his agenda and then went back into the private sector. Could we stop the Pious Baloney and Gingrich demolished Romney's myth of the reluctant politician, who just happens to be running for office since the early 1990s and during this last years as Governor was raising money for his presidential run. A bewildered Rick Santorum asked Romney whether he would run for re-election if he became President. Of course, the answer was yes.

++Gingrich has taken the Bain issue by the horns. Frankly, I felt that this would not be a real winner, even though Ted Kennedy used it to get effectiveness in the 1990s. But since Romney still receives millions a year from his time at Bain it remains relevant. "They apparently looted the companies, left people unemployed and walked off"said Gingrich. Gingrich's SuperPac has purchased a 40 minute film about Bain , which they will be running in South Carolina but the clip is up and it is devastating.

++The DNC went after Romney's bizarre explanation about whether or whether or not he saw his SuperPac's attack ads against Newt. Romney seemed to drift toward illegality when he said he raised money for the Pac himself and put his staffers to run it. He did and did not see the ads--sort of.

++Democrats have been urging their party to reply toi Romney's assertions he has created more jobs than Obama. They needn't worry as the Republican field is demolishing that idea by their attacks on Romney.

++Romney also showed his human touch by saying he doesn't care for the type of humor in The Onion.

++Romney's very peculiar habit of chonically lying hit again when he said that President Obama didn't sign any Free Trade Agreements. Let's see--Korea, Colombia, Panama, and what was the Asian summit about.

++A CBS poll is out this morning that shows five Republicans within five pts of each other nationally. Romney is at 20 and over the last several months had not topped 23%.

++The Americans for Legal Immigration claim Romney is not eligible to run for President because he's an anchor baby. Romney's father was born in Mexico and according to the Mexican constitution was considered a Mexican citizen. This is sort of fun. We went through this when George ran for the Republican nomination in 1968 and of course the whole thing was nonsense then as now. But it is rich considering the multi-year effort to discredit Barack Obama as some kind of foreigner.

++Maybe that's the reason Newt said Romney was "anti-American" and Huntsman said Romney's attitude was the reason the country was "polarized". Actually, the 'anti-American" remark was about only rich people should run for office and the polarized remark was about Romney putting ideology and party before country.

++Romney is significant leads in South Carolina and Florida, raising the question whether we want the Republican primary to end soon or not. For independent observers, it would be a mercy-killing. Others say that the Democrats would benefit by the constant warring and the attacks on Romney. I'm not so sure. Remember all these debates are free advertsing. Once Romney clinches it, he has to spend his own dime to keep in the news and compete with an incumbent President. The upside of this is that he can start pivoting away from his extreme positions to more acceptable ones for the general electorate.


++Thomas Frank, the author of What's Wrong with Kansas and Pity The Billionaire, urges the Tea Party to just accept Romney. He writes with some irony that Romney is their perfect candidate, a pure capitalist, which is after all what they really wanted.




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