Smoter-in-Chief

Obama smote Mitt.  For example, he won the navel war:


 A vote for Romney is a vote for a very shaky character as Commander-in-Chief.  That's the take home message of tonight's debate.

The rest is just spin.

Romnesia

President Obama is back on the case.  He's shaken off whatever sleeping sickness affliction he had in that first 2012 Presidential Debate way back whenever weeks ago and came out gunning with smarts and strategy for the second debate this past Tuesday night.  And now he really seems to be enjoying himself:



Whichever speechwriter came up with the phrase, "Romnesia," deserves a great position in the President's second term, if all goes well.  The President uses the phrase to capture Romney's pandering as well as his untrustworthiness.  What's key about the latter characterization is that it implies a not-so-hidden agenda, namely to ultimately serve the Republican objectives of privileged rules for the rich while shifting the most threatening burdens of risk from government onto a struggling American Middle Class populace, not to mention the poor.

Best of all, the President caps his diagnosis with a triumphantly received cure - Obamacare's coverage of pre-existing conditions.  Good luck to GOP strategists who thought saddling the Affordable Care Act with that moniker would be a net negative - if Obama wins his second term and the law remains intact, it will be a trademarked Democratic legacy for all time.

If so, I expect that Fox News will eventually revert to calling it the ACA or maybe some new negative term they invent.  You will see Republicans in 2024 or 2040 running on how they want to "preserve Obamacare" by turning it into a voucher system, and how dare their Democratic opponent threaten Obamacare by whatever mild reforms they may enact or advocate to keep it running.

Just like Medicare, the signature achievement of President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Democrat.

C'ryan

Yes, the Dems should not get complacent with Romney's pick of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) as Vice Presidential running-mate. Ryan is smooth like a used car salesman and fully committed to dismantling our government in order to save the rich even more money. His convictions will come through where Romney's do not. The Villagers - those DC media elite who fashion the news - like Ryan and have branded him as an intellect. It's not the same as Sarah Palin, although Romney's desperation is the same as McCain's was back then.

There's some buzz out there that Romney's own team did not want him to pick Ryan, or that Obama's team wanted to run against Ryan. Both may be true, but they still shouldn't underestimate the 42-year-old, even if it seems like Ryan could cost the GOP Florida.

What Obama For America and its allies need to do is exactly what they did to Mitt Romney himself - brand Paul Ryan nationally before the GOP has a chance to do it themselves.

After all, even Obama's 2008 opponent, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) has admitted that the ads defining Romney as unacceptable have been a success.

Mr. 0%

Is it possible that for ten of the past twelve years, Willard Mitt Romney paid no federal income tax at all?

According to an unnamed source known to both Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and CNN's Dana Bash, that's the case. And Reid is not backing down when Romney tells Hannity that he oughtta "put up or shut up," he's doubling down:

“It’s clear Romney is hiding something, and the American people deserve to know what it is. Whatever Romney’s hiding probably speaks volumes about how he would approach issues that directly impact middle-class families, like tax reform and the economy. When you are running for president, you should be an open book.

The Dems are forcing Romney into a corner of his own making. Mitt keeps having to defend, primarily because whatever is in those taxes is obviously damaging to him, or else he'd release them. Since the wealthy live by different rules and have all the tax lawyers and tax accountants in the world to help them "preserve capital" it is not hard to imagine Mitt having skirted his civic duty, even if foolish for someone with designs on the White House.

This whole narrative has made it impossible for Mitt to carefully choreograph his introduction to the electorate - Obama For America has already introduced him to us all as Mr. Bain, destroyer of American businesses. Best of all for Barack, it plays right into Romney's policy choices, as demonstrated by this new, hard-hitting ad:



My only fear is that Romney is so weakened by the time the GOP Convention rolls around, they replace him with somebody who might actually win.

Not So Funny

It turns out that Mitt Romney is flat out lying when he says government spending has "exploded" under President Obama:



Ah, Willard. How do you know he's lying? His lips are moving. And then, of course, sometimes he laughs:



WTF with that? Garry Wills has some thoughts:

Everyone has noticed by now the non-laugh laugh of Mitt Romney, a kind of half-stifled barking. But what does it mean? It is blurted out as abruptly as it is broken off. Is it a kind of punctuation, part comma, part full stop, part interrogatory mark? What, if anything, is it trying to convey? Why does it seem more like coughing or burping than laughter?

Does it mean: “I know you are saying something critical about me, and I don’t know how to answer it, so I’ll just pretend that you did not mean it seriously”?

Or: “I want to show I am just a regular fellow, so I’ll try out my regular-fellow laugh”?

Or: “I hope you will take what I just said as something humorous, though I doubt it, but I’ll see if I can start a laughing chain reaction”?

Or: “I want to change the subject, but there is no natural way to do that, so I’ll just throw in this comic rictus as a non-sequitur”?

Or: “The Cheshire Cat could evanesce by leaving just a smile behind, so maybe I can avoid attention by disappearing away from my laugh”?

James Lipton has some ideas how Mitt can "fix" it:

He is so obviously "acting" after all.

Baby What'd I Say

Oh, that Willard:

QUESTION: “When you did an interview with Sean Hannity in February, you said that you believed that Obama is trying to make America a less Christian nation. It was responding to quote that he had just played for you on the radio. Do you stand by that? And do you believe that President Obama’s world view was shaped by Reverend Wright and do you see evidence of that in his policies?”

ROMNEY: “I’m not familiar precisely with what I said, but I’ll stand by what I said, whatever it was.”

Looks like that line will join the other Romney gaffest-hits, like "Etch-a-Sketch," "Corporations are People," "I like firing people," "I'll be you $10,000," "severe Conservative" and so many more. You're sure to be seeing this clip again:



He's been lying so much, it looks like truth to him.

Real Stakes

So Willard lost a donor, very publicly, over his embrace of "one man/one woman" marriage as the only one he'll accept:

"I feel that I no longer wish to support your presidential campaign and ask you that you please return the maximum contribution that I gave to you last year," Bill White wrote in a letter to Romney, according to a report by CNN. "You have chosen to be on the wrong side of history and I do not support your run for president any longer."

White, a registered independent who runs a New York-based consulting firm, had given $2,500 to the Romney campaign.

White made his decision following Obama's announcement last week that he supports same-sex marriage. While he clarified to CNN that he does not agree with the president on fiscal issues, White said that Romney's speech during Liberty University's commencement on Saturday led him to believe that Romney would press for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage -- a position that White simply cannot support.

"I feel like [Romney has] declared war on my marriage," White said. "And I could just sit back and not say anything. Or I could do something about it. And I've chosen to do something about it."

Meanwhile, in the African-American community, a leading heterosexual comes out in favor of Obama's stance:

“I’ve always thought it as something that was still holding the country back,” Jay-Z said, referencing the fact that same-sex marriage is not recognized nationwide. “What people do in their own homes is their business and you can choose to love whoever you love. That’s their business. It's no different than discriminating against blacks. It’s discrimination plain and simple.”

Though he was in Philadelphia to appear alongside Mayor Michael Nutter and announce a two-day music festival in early September, Jay-Z sat down with CNN's Poppy Harlow to chat about broader issues. When he was asked if he felt Obama's decision to come out in favor of the right of same-sex couples to marry would cost him votes (particularly with the African-American community), he shrugged. "It's really not about votes," he said. "It's about people."

Hopefully Jay-Z's influence will be felt far and wide on this issue.

Meanwhile, the Obama campaign - NOT a surrogate PAC - released this ad straight out of Karl Rove's handbook, attacking his opponent's supposed strength:



Ju-jitsu, Mr. Rove. And nice branding for Mr. Romney.

BULLY

"Scour Romney’s record for a single example of real political courage -- a single, solitary instance, however small, where Romney placed principle or substance above his own short- term political interests. Let me know if you find one ... His campaign has been an exercise in feeble appeasement. The only thing he appears to be dedicated to is abasing himself to the hard-right wing of the Republican Party. Consider the way he allowed a foreign-policy spokesman to be drummed out of the campaign simply for being gay ... Romney flunks the character test. He seems incapable of making the hard, sometimes unpopular, choices that are part of the job," - Gerald Rafshoon, former spokesman for president Carter.

Weak

The Romney Presidential campaign just had a high-profile resignation today, and one that should give them pause to make a fundamental change in his/their approach. But, having seen Willard kowtow to the rightwing Republican base thus far, he probably won't. As reported by Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

Richard Grenell, the openly gay spokesman recently hired to sharpen the foreign policy message of Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, has resigned in the wake of a full-court press by anti-gay conservatives.

In a statement obtained by Right Turn, Grenell says:

I have decided to resign from the Romney campaign as the Foreign Policy and National Security Spokesman. While I welcomed the challenge to confront President Obama’s foreign policy failures and weak leadership on the world stage, my ability to speak clearly and forcefully on the issues has been greatly diminished by the hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues that sometimes comes from a presidential campaign. I want to thank Governor Romney for his belief in me and my abilities and his clear message to me that being openly gay was a non-issue for him and his team.

According to sources familiar with the situation, Grenell decided to resign after being kept under wraps during a time when national security issues, including the president’s ad concerning Osama bin Laden, had emerged front and center in the campaign.

Most damning:

During the two weeks after Grenell’s hiring was announced the Romney campaign did not put Grenell out to comment on national security matters and did not use him on a press foreign policy conference call. Despite the controversy in new media and in conservative circles, there was no public statement of support for Grenell by the campaign and no supportive social conservatives were enlisted to calm the waters.

As I've written before, Romney is not a leader in the true sense. He appear incapable to taking a position unpopular to his base, making a convincing moral case, and either turning them around to his point of view or at least earning widespread respect for his rectitude. He's a loser, not a leader.

Per Josh Marshall, this is Romney playing into "bitch-slap politics" without the Obama campaign even having to try that hard:

The Obama campaign has spent days hammering the claim that Mitt lacked the fortitude to make the risky choice to launch a commando raid to kill Osama bin Laden. Either it was that he said it wasn’t sufficiently important or that he said he wouldn’t violate Pakistani sovereignty to launch such an attack. In either case, the core message was ‘I was right; he was wrong.’ But as I’ve argued, the ferocity of the attack itself was meant to diminish Romney as weak and helpless, a man unable to properly defend himself.

...

Against that backdrop, the sudden resignation of Romney’s new foreign policy spokesman Richard Grenell came at just the wrong time since it told just the same story about Romney as the Obama campaign has been telling all week: Romney is weak.

...

“It’s going to be difficult for Romney to take other steps like this. And that’s what’s really frightening to me,” Fred Karger, openly gay Republican candidate for president told TPM. “It’s just too tough to stand up to these groups because they have a lot of money and power. You’ve got to be able to do that, that’s leadership.”

...

In other words, Romney’s actions have spoken louder than his awkward replies to the original bin Laden smackdown. In the face of attacks meant to show he can’t stand up to Osama bin Laden, Romney shows he can’t stand down the far-right homophobes in his own party.

Or more simply, as Obama campaign's Stephanie Cutter tweeted out:

“How can voters trust Romney to stand up to the Soviets & Czechoslovakia if he's folding to rt wing on hiring gay staff?

Americans don't vote for weakies for President. There's still a canyon of time to fill between now and November 6th, so maybe Mitt can turn it around, but I believe this early imprinting is just the beginning of what's really going to fill the airwaves and, as I predicted months ago, Mitt Romney will make Bob Dole look like a winner.

Exactly

Robert Gibbs, Obama campaign advisor, said it best on Meet the Press this weekend:

"I think sometimes you listen to the Romney campaign and they do think a lot people in this country are stupid," Gibbs told NBC's David Gregory. "Their message is: You didn't clean up our mess fast enough."

More direct swipes at Romney and the failed GOP philosophy of governance:

"The last six months of the Bush administration, we lost three and half million jobs. We know this about Mitt Romney: He's not a job creator. When he was governor of Massachusetts, they were 47th out of 50 in job creation. His experience is in downsizing, outsourcing jobs and bankrupting companies and walking away with a lot of money for himself."

Gibbs added: "His economic ideas are the failed economic ideas that we tried for eight years, tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires, and letting Wall Street going back to writing the rules all over again. That is the policies that got us into this mess."

Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein of two different institutes with two different political bents have joined forces to actually tell the truth: the reason our political system is so frustratingly polarized is almost entirely the fault of the modern-day Republican Party:

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

“Both sides do it” or “There is plenty of blame to go around” are the traditional refuges for an American news media intent on proving its lack of bias, while political scientists prefer generality and neutrality when discussing partisan polarization. Many self-styled bipartisan groups, in their search for common ground, propose solutions that move both sides to the center, a strategy that is simply untenable when one side is so far out of reach.

Or, as Jimmy Kimmel put it at the White House Press Correspondents dinner on Saturday:

I have my own theory about President Lincoln's death. I think John Wilkes Booth was innocent. I don't even think it was an assassination. I believe that Abraham Lincoln had a vision about what the Republican party would become in 150 years, and he shot himself."

Let's hope America is less self-destructive in November.

Media Bias

What a surprise -- Fox News fabricates an Obama quote. Expect a real retraction? Not likely. And the way it works is that Fox lies, other news organizations pick it up as truth, and by the time the lie gets halfway around cable TV news, the truth isn't even out of make-up.

Meanwhile, for Mitt: more favorable news coverage than Obama.

Has Fox News done enough groundwork over the past four years to color ALL news coverage of the best President in my lifetime and swing the election?

Untrustworthy

Clearly:

A vote for Willard is a vote for oligarchy.

Severe Memories

I'm sure the Obama campaign was saving this video for just this moment when the last viable challenger to dropped out and Millionaire Mitt would be just itchin' to Etch-a-Sketch his way to being perceived as a "centrist." But just in case anyone forgets, here comes the hostile branding:



So do you think Willard's dismal numbers against Barack will improve...or erode even further by the time we reach Election Day in November?

Lying P.o.S.

Mitt Romney is a goddamned liar:



Bring it, Willard. You're building your campaign on a bed of sand.

No, Really?

Settling is still, at the end of the day, unsatisfying:

But if you listen to Joe Scarborough, Republicans have basically given up on winning in November. He's not the first person to say it (George Will suggested a month ago that the time to give up on the presidential race was coming), but we haven't heard anyone of his prominence say so vociferously that Republicans are all thinking this one's over, as Scarborough did on today's "Morning Joe":

"Nobody thinks Romney's going to win. Let's just be honest. Can we just say this for everybody at home? Let me just say this for everybody at home. The Republican establishment -- I've yet to meet a single person in the Republican establishment that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election this year. They won't say it on TV because they've got to go on TV and they don't want people writing them nasty emails. I obviously don't care. But I have yet to meet anybody in the Republican establishment that worked for George W. Bush, that works in the Republican congress, that worked for Ronald Reagan that thinks Mitt Romney is going to win the general election."

Romney: huge bummer for all.

Obama the Centrist

President Barack Obama took on the Paul Ryan GOP budget, which defunds services to the middle class and needy Americans to fund still more tax cuts for the rich without specifying where budget deficit reduction will actually come from, in a strong speech today:

Chiding Republicans for not learning anything from the failure of trickle-down policies that defined the last decades, Obama attacked the GOP budget head-on. “They have proposed a budget so far to the right it makes the Contract for America look like the New Deal,” he said. “In fact, that renowned liberal, Newt Gingrich, first called the original version of the budget radical. He said it would contribute to right-wing social engineering. … This is now the party’s governing platform. This is what they are running on. One of my potential opponents, Gov. Romney, has said he hopes a similar version of this plan from last year would be introduced as a bill on Day One of his presidency.”

...

“There’s oftentimes the impulse to suggest that, if the two parties are disagreeing, they’re equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle,” Obama cautioned the room full of reporters. “And an equivalence is presented, which reinforces people’s cynicism about Washington in general. This is not one of those situations where there is an equivalence.”

The president noted that a similar theme has played out on other key issues, including cap-and-trade and Obama’s own health care law, both of which were first proposed as conservative alternatives to liberal approaches to environmental and health care reforms.

“Suddenly, this is some socialist overreach,” Obama joked.

“It is important to remember that the positions I’m taking on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, it would have been considered squarely centrist positions,” Obama said. “What has changed is the center of the Republican Party.”

Amen, brother. Greg Sargent does a nice job delineating the three main political objectives of the speech:

1) Obama cast the Romney-Ryan-GOP approach as not only radical and extreme, but as a proven failure.

2) Obama defended government activism as not just morally right, but as a way to facilitate economic growth.

3) Obama framed the choice as one over who sacrifices to fix the deficit.

Full explanations via the link above. One can only hope President Obama is reelected in November, if for no other reason than to defeat the most ideological, partisan, unrealistic budget proposal by a major political party in my lifetime. Per the facts.

Here's the speech:

Don't blow it, America.

Full of Mitt

Why are Romney's numbers tanking against Obama?

Could it be his plan (now on hold) to put a car elevator (I kid you not) in his new mansion?

Could it be his pretzel logic on Leno regarding what he'd replace the Affordable Care Act with, seemingly come up with in the moment, making little to no sense?

Or maybe it's his increasingly off-putting "sense of humor":

At the outset of the call, Romney said he has some connections to Wisconsin.

“One of most humorous I think relates to my father. You may remember my father, George Romney, was president of an automobile company called American Motors … They had a factory in Michigan, and they had a factory in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and another one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin,” said Romney. “And as the president of the company he decided to close the factory in Michigan and move all the production to Wisconsin. Now later he decided to run for governor of Michigan and so you can imagine that having closed the factory and moved all the production to Wisconsin was a very sensitive issue to him, for his campaign.”

Romney said he recalled a parade in which the school band marching with his father’s campaign only knew the Wisconsin fight song, not the Michigan song.

“So every time they would start playing ‘On Wisconsin, on Wisconsin,’ my dad’s political people would jump up and down and try to get them to stop, because they didn’t want people in Michigan to be reminded that my dad had moved production to Wisconsin,” said Romney, laughing.

Ho, ho, ho!

Yes, it's the perfect time for Willard to lock up the nomination.

Bullshit Candidate

If there was ever any -- any -- remaining doubt that Mitt Romney is a joke candidate with no core convictions (other than love and respect of wealth), then this statement from his campaign spokesperson, Eric Fehrnstrom, has made it clear that he's the emptiest of empty suits:

Is it a gaffe if all you're doing is revealing the truth behind your campaign curtain?

I think this one is going to stick, especially coming on the heels of a big Primary win (Illinois) and repeating his snatch-defeat-from-victory pattern of following wins with gaffe's. There's already a website up with Mitt's Etch-a-Sketch position changes -- just click on the words to see yet another example. Both Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich brandished an Etch-a-Sketch today, and the political ads just write themselves.

Here's Romney (a terrible candidate to begin with) trying to put the genie back in the bottle later in the day:

You have to bet that his approval ratings will fall further, and maybe this is the big opening that Santorum needs to scoop Romney in the upcoming state contests.

BTW, I love the Etch-a-Sketch product and have since childhood. I love that it's been owned by the same company that created it for over 50 years. I love the statement they put out today and, most of all, hope their sales rocket skyward...as the Romney campaign tumbles towards hell.

Fractured

Mitt Romney is geographically challenged:

So it is fitting, in a way, that after two big losses in the latest Republican primaries on Tuesday night, the main pitch for Romney's campaign is now, basically, mathematical probability. The former Massachusetts governor finished third in Mississippi, behind Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, with 30 percent of the vote. And he was headed for a third-place finish in Alabama, with 29 percent of the vote.

The double-barreled setback was unexpected in Mississippi, reflecting neither polling numbers nor the expectations that Romney's campaign was setting in the days leading up to the vote. And in the aftermath, Romney's aides were left with unemotional appeals for why the primary remained very much his alone.

"Mathematically we are fast approaching the point where it is going to be a virtual impossibility" for opponents to win enough delegates, Romney's top spokesman Eric Ferhnstrom told CNN.

Wow, that's a compelling campaign message. Inspire me again, Mitt. Please.

Garage Burner

By no coincidence, on the very day of the Michigan primary, where Romney and Santorum battle to see who will lose to President Obama in November, the President spoke to the United Auto Workers with a refreshing barnburner of a speech that calls out the arguments made by the GOP candidates that we should not have bailed out the auto industry in the crash they helped create. (Or maybe that we should have done it their way, or maybe we did do it their way -- depending on the day that these guys, particularly Romney, are speaking.)

I sure hope to hear more like this as we close in on November:

Willard or Rick or some non-declared GOP candidate? It only matters to the Party itself -- the Party of Failed Ideas.