Romney campaign called incompetent by a Republican pundit & questioned by others.

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blankslate

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Here is something that a staffer of President Reagan's administration said

http://blogs.wsj.com/peggynoonan/2012/09/18/time-for-an-intervention/
The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.


My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.


This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America.
It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one. It’s not big, it’s not brave, it’s not thoughtfully tackling great issues. It’s always been too small for the moment. All the activists, party supporters and big donors should be pushing for change. People want to focus on who at the top is least constructive and most responsible. Fine, but Mitt Romney is no puppet: He chooses who to listen to. An intervention is in order. “Mitt, this isn’t working.”
Damn... it's hard to say that you're living up to President Reagan's example when you're getting this kind of flak from a person who actually was on his staff.




Mark McKinney an aid for President G.W. Bush had this to say.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articl...-why-time-is-running-out-for-mitt-romney.html
Well, the release of the Romney tape was a moment that certainly revealed something about him. But not what I was hoping for. Just the opposite. It reveals a deeply cynical man, who sees the country as completely divided, as two completely different sets of people, and who would likely govern in a way that would only further divide us.
What about seniors on limited incomes who do not pay taxes? What about veterans? What about even middle-income families with young children and the deductions that go with them? They are not victims, although they might now view themselves that way under a Romney administration.

How can anyone support a candidate with this kind of a vision of the country? Isn’t a divided America under Obama what folks on the right rail against?
Damning words.

Does this mean that President Obama doesn't have his own issues?

Of course not. One thing I don't like about President Obama was the way his administration treated Shirley Sherrod unfairly before all of the facts about that dipshit Breitbart's hit piece on her came out.

However, with the state of Governor Romney's campaign with prominent republicans questioning how it is being run.

You can't honestly say that there isn't something wrong with it at the moment.

It would be bad enough if it was just pundits saying things but there has also been at least one republican candidate running for office this election cycle that has made a similar statement about Governor Romney.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/republicans-distance-romneys-47-percent-remark/story?id=17273355

Senate candidate Linda McMahon from CT
I disagree with Governor Romney's insinuation that 47% of Americans believe they are victims who must depend on the government for their care. I know that the vast majority of those who rely on government are not in that situation because they want to be. People today are struggling because the government has failed to keep America competitive, failed to support job creators, and failed to get our economy back on track.
Senator Scott Brown from Mass.
Massachusetts Republican Sen. Scott Brown wrote in an email to The Hill, "That's not the way I view the world. As someone who grew up in tough circumstances, I know that being on public assistance is not a spot that anyone wants to be in. Too many people today who want to work are being forced into public assistance for lack of jobs."
So what can Governor Romney and his supporters do?

Barring some mishap happening to the U.S. which one ass here who shall remain unnamed has already speculated about, this might last in the news consciousness.
 
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mshan

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“It’s a stretch,” said Reagan biographer Lou Cannon, who covered the 1980 campaign for The Washington Post. “It’s hard to make a Carter out of [President] Obama, and it’s even harder to make a Reagan out of Romney. I don’t mean any disrespect to Romney, but I think he’s run a poor campaign. You can’t say anything within this close a margin is over. I don’t do that. But he’s got a lot more to do at this point to win than Reagan had to do.”
"Reagan, meanwhile, was the overwhelming favorite of the Republican base. Considered the heir apparent after his narrow 1976 loss to Gerald Ford, he marched to the Republican nomination after losing the Iowa caucuses — which he’d blown off.

“You have to look at it like a French impressionist painting,” said Reagan biographer Craig Shirley, an adviser to conservative causes. “If you stand way back, you say, ‘There are maybe some similarities between 1980 and 2012.’ But the closer you get to the painting the more it separates.

In 1980, Reagan indeed trailed Carter by a few points in Gallup tracking during the fall, but he actually led in most polls taken from early June through November, according to a compilation of all the available 1980 numbers from George Washington University political scientist John Sides:

trialheats1980.png


The race stayed competitive from Labor Day until the debate on the Tuesday before the election, which Reagan dominated, but Reagan got a big bounce after his convention in Detroit that Romney did not see after Tampa.

“Reagan was down, but Reagan’s unfavorable ratings were not increasing,” said Roger Stone, the Northeast Regional Political Director for Reagan’s 1980 campaign. “His unfavorables were going down. Romney’s in the reverse situation.”

The Reagan march to victory has become a favorite political parable for GOP campaigns who have slipped behind in the polls, no matter the individual circumstances. It was about this time in 2008, as John McCain started dipping behind Obama, that his campaign began trumpeting Reagan’s 1980 comeback.

But the country was far different electorally. The ex-Georgia governor’s political base that propelled his 1976 victory — southern Democrats and evangelicals— had soured on him by 1980. It would be like a big chunk of urban liberals and African-Americans turning on Obama.

Reagan capitalized on the discontent, carrying one in four Democrats that November. His victory ushered in the modern-day, solidly-red South.

“Romney’s not Reagan, and that’s a big difference,” said Ed Rollins, who ran Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign and managed Michele Bachmann’s bid last year. “But, at the end of the day, the biggest difference is there was a large segment of Democrats and they kind of floated… If Romney gets five to six percent of the Democratic vote, he’ll be lucky.”

This race has been so much less volatile than in 1980. Polls all year have shown significantly fewer undecided voters and those willing to change their minds. Illinois congressman John Anderson, who ran as an independent after losing in the Republican primaries, remained a wild-card until the end. He drew a fifth of the vote in national polls that summer and finished with 6.6 percent.

“Virtually every state in the county was in play as of October 1980,” said Shirley. “Carter was campaigning in California, and Reagan was campaigning in New York City…Texas was in play. Now its routinely Republican, but Carter had taken it in 1976.”

Fewer electoral votes are in play for Romney now. The country is more polarized. Obama has a lock on certain demographics and states. There’s no chance Romney will come close in California or New York.

The economy of 2012 is not nearly as bad as the economy of 1980. The country faced double-digit inflation and double-digit interest rates – creating a painful nightmare known as stagflation. Gas prices weren’t just high. There had been shortages.

“It seems to me that that’s the big difference,” said conservative activist Jeff Bell, who produced Reagan TV spots in 1980. “In that situation, Carter was to blame. Voters saw him to blame, and the remaining issue was for Reagan to qualify himself. And he did that in the first and only debate.”

“The problem with it happening (again) is that people still don’t blame Obama only,” he added. “They blame Bush more than Obama for the state of the economy.”
“I think the Romney campaign is the worst campaign I’ve seen, and I’ve been watching campaigns since 1952,” Rafshoon added. “No message … It was a bad convention … People liked Reagan, and they don’t like Romney.”

Stone, a Reagan foot solider in 1980, now consults for former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party bid.

“Reagan was a non-establishment figure who came from a lower middle class background,” he said. “He had been a Democrat. He had great empathy for working people because he had been one. Mitt Romney, the only working people he knows are his servants.”

“I knew Ronald Reagan,” Stone added. “Ronald Reagan was a friend of mine. And Mitt Romney is no Ronald Reagan.”

Whole Article
: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81566.html
 
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