2012 Campaign: Bad gets even worse for Romney
What we now see happening is Mitt Romney and how he really sees America and the so called 47% who he claims are non tax paying, government dependent, people who feel that they deserve food, housing, and medical care free of charge. What he claims to have realized is that they will automatically vote for President Obama because they know that he will give them all of this without fail. Mitt Romney says that these same people are victims.
Republicans: Bad gets worse for Romney
KASIE HUNT and STEVE PEOPLES
Published: Yesterday
Lunch is served as Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney speaks at a campaign fundraising event, the first of which reporters' cameras were allowed in, at The Grand America in Salt Lake City, Utah, Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
WASHINGTON (AP) - A bad stretch for Mitt Romney just got worse, and Republican insiders now are growing increasingly pessimistic about the GOP presidential nominee's chances of winning the White House.
The latest heartburn for these insiders is Romney's refusal to back down from his statement that nearly half of Americans believe they are victims dependent upon government.
After his remarks, made to donors at a private fundraiser in May, came to light in a video, the candidate defended his position - and did so again Tuesday. He told Fox News: "I know some believe that government should take from some to give to the others. I think that's an entirely foreign concept."
Publicly, Romney's campaign shrugs off the criticism. Aides say Romney will try to shift the debate back to the specifics of his vision for the country in hopes of curbing President Barack Obama's momentum before the first debate on Oct. 3 - and then seal the deal.
But, at least this week, there are doubts in GOP circles that he can prevail.
"This is a worst case scenario in some respects," Republican strategist Steve Lombardo said a day after Romney's remarks roiled the campaign. Obama has been painting Romney as an out-of-touch elitist, and Lombardo said the remarks "tend to reinforce pre-existing perception."
"Anytime that happens a campaign has to worry," Lombardo said.
The remarks were just the latest headache for Romney seven weeks before Election Day and with early voting well under way.
Romney critics and backers alike point to his misstep-filled trip abroad in July as an early signal of worry. Then came Romney's nominating convention, where Hollywood actor/director Clint Eastwood stole the show with a rambling conversation with an empty chair representing the president.
Obama's well-received convention followed. And so did a boost for the president in state and national polling.
Last week, Romney tried to use anti-American unrest in the Middle East to seize political advantage, only to be criticized for prematurely assailing the commander in chief before knowing all the facts, including that a U.S. ambassador had died. Then there were reports of infighting among his staff, and calls from Republicans for Romney to do more than just criticize Obama on the economy.
Heeding that advice, Romney began the week aiming to focus more on giving voters a better sense of what he would do as president. Then his remarks from the spring fundraiser surfaced, and he defended himself.
By Tuesday, Republicans were on edge. And some warned that Romney's road to the presidency was getting steeper.
Most of the more than a dozen GOP consultants interviewed for this story wouldn't openly discuss their concerns for fear of angering Romney's inner circle.
But there was an overwhelming sense that Romney needs to do something to shake up the race. Many Republicans said they view the upcoming debates as Romney's last chance to turn the tide - and even then it might be too late, given that a chunk of voters in key states will already have voted before the first debate.
Although they concede that the timing was bad, Romney aides insist he has nothing to apologize for. They say there is more than enough time to recover. They also point to larger polling gaps made up by Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in past elections, and to national tracking surveys that show Romney starting to recover.
Some Republicans see the same trends.
"It's been rough couple of weeks, but better for Romney to be going through a rough patch now than a month from now," said Sara Taylor Fagen, a former top political aide to President George W. Bush. "Forty-nine days is an eternity in politics, and the race remains very close."
Other Republicans fear that Romney isn't listening to advice from core staffers and is too involved in the day-to-day mechanics of the campaign, leading him to make mistakes he wouldn't otherwise make because he's not focused on his primary objective - persuading voters to back him. In GOP circles, there also are grumbles that the campaign is focused too much on the storyline of the day instead of articulating Romney's vision for the country, and that the campaign missed an opportunity to do that with a convention several said fell flat.
"It's incumbent on the Romney campaign to make it about Obama's handling of the economy," said Fergus Cullen, a former Republican Party chairman in New Hampshire. He's among the Republicans who think this is a temporary hiccup that will blow over, saying: "There are seven weeks to go and the topic of conversation will change, literally, from day to day."
Several Republicans noted Romney's schedule of the past few days, saying he was squandering an opportunity to talk to voters in battleground states. He's spent the bulk of the week raising money across the country in states that are not competitive. His last public rally was Friday afternoon outside Cleveland.
It hasn't been an easy period for Romney on the road either.
While he was singing happy birthday and raising millions of dollars on Friday, the tension showed by Sunday.
An event scheduled for Sunday in Colorado was canceled because of a small plane crash at the Pueblo, Colo., airport near the planned rally. Then aides scrambled to respond to a Politico story filled with criticisms about the state of Romney's campaign. Immediately after giving a speech intended to signal a new strategy to right his campaign, Romney faced his latest challenge when the secretly taped-video of the May fundraiser popped up.
It dominated the campaign news for several hours before the campaign called an impromptu news conference at which Romney acknowledged that his comments were "not elegantly stated" but stood by them anyway.
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Associated Press writers Ken Thomas in Salt Lake City and Philip Elliott in Washington contributed to this report.
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Follow Kasie Hunt on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/kasie and Steve Peoples at http://www.twitter.com/sppeoples
© 2012 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.
Romney's 5 Oddest Fundraiser Statements on Israel, Iran, and Peace
By
In a secretly recorded meeting with donors, the presidential candidate offered some surprising thoughts on the Middle East.
In a closed-door meeting with fundraisers, leaked video of which was just released, presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a number of unusually candid statements. It's hard to know the extent to which he was honestly speaking his mind on how he'd govern, taking campaign shots at Obama with a little less caution and forethought than he might have used in a public address, or simply telling some very rich donors what they wanted to hear. But it's worth looking at some of his more jarring statements on foreign policy, however accurately they do or do not reflect his actual views.
1) "The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace. ... I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel."
It's never hard to find cynics willing to question the motives of either the Israeli or Palestinian leaders engaged in the peace process. And it's never hard to find cause for cynicism in that long, frustrating, difficult process. But it's unsettling to see a would-be leader of U.S. foreign policy, which includes stewardship of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, so blithely and sweepingly dismiss an entire side. It would be surprising enough if Romney had suggested that, say, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has "no interest whatsoever in establishing peace," but to treat Palestinians as categorically opposed to peace is a rather extreme interpretation, one that would not seem to serve his potential role as mediator.
2) "The pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish. ... We have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it."
As Tufts professor Dan Drezner put it at his Foreign Policy blog, "One of the best critiques that a GOP challenger can make of Barack Obama's administration is that he's made a hash of the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. In this video, Romney pretty much revealed that he wouldn't be changing that policy anytime soon." But he would seem to bring some deep pessimism about the efficacy of even trying, which is easy to sympathize with, but doesn't suggest he'd do much to pressure either side to at least try for peace if he thinks it's hopeless.
3) "The other side of the West Bank, the other side of what would be this new Palestinian state would either be Syria at one point, or Jordan. And of course the Iranians would want to do through the West Bank exactly what they did through Lebanon, what they did near Gaza. Which is that the Iranians would want to bring missiles and armament into the West Bank and potentially threaten Israel."
At the risk of nitpicking, the West Bank does not border Syria; it borders Jordan, which is an American, not Iranian, ally. So it's not clear that Iran would have as easy a time moving weapons into the West Bank as into Lebanon. Still, Gaza doesn't border an Iranian ally either, and Gaza-based Hamas still derives real support from Iran. But the question is why Romney seems to assume it's so likely that Palestinians in the West Bank would be such natural allies of Iran. Whatever his reason for believing that an independent West Bank would ally with Iran, why has that same logic not led Jordan to do so? Why haven't the 2.7 million Palestinians living in Jordan, outside of the Israeli occupation, joined up with Iran and Syria?
4) "If I were Iran -- a crazed fanatic, I'd say let's get a little fissile material to Hezbollah, have them carry it to Chicago or some other place, and then if anything goes wrong, or America starts acting up, we'll just say, 'Guess what? Unless you stand down, why, we're going to let off a dirty bomb.' I mean this is where we have -- where America could be held up and blackmailed by Iran, by the mullahs, by crazy people."
This is an odd threat to speculate on for four reasons: (1) Post-2001 U.S. no-fly lists are so sensitive that even Nelson Mandela struggled to get off them, so it's hard to foresee Hezbollah members skating in and out of the U.S. (2) U.S. border security specifically screens for radioactive material, which is particularly easy to detect because it is ... radioactive. (3) Any bomb is dangerous, and that includes a bomb that would disperse poisonous radiation, but a "dirty bomb" is not the same thing you might have seen on 24. Uranium, the material Iran is using in its nascent program, "is simply not a good radioactive bomb material," as the Federation of American Scientists explained. That's not to say that dirty bombs are fine and dandy, but the difficulty of bringing nuclear material into the U.S. far exceeds the potential harm that material would add to a conventional explosion, which is enough of a threat on its own. (4) All of which is to say that there are plenty of reasons that the U.S. president should be and is highly concerned about Iran's nuclear program, but this somewhat outlandish scenario would be pretty far down the list.
5) "The president's foreign policy, in my opinion, is formed in part by a perception he has that his magnetism, and his charm, and his persuasiveness is so compelling that he can sit down with people like Putin and Chávez and Ahmadinejad, and that they'll find that we're such wonderful people that they'll go on with us, and they'll stop doing bad things."
President Obama has not met with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez or Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and in fact has been remarkably severe particularly on the latter's regime, crippling it with ever-tightening economic sanctions and threat of military deterrence. It's true that Obama has met with Russian President Vladimir Putin, but their meeting this June was reported as "chilly" or "tense," not one of charms and persuasion. Even if Obama had met more cordially with Putin, as he has with previous Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, that's often a part of international diplomacy, and would have followed the example of Putin's greatest American charmer, President George W. Bush. This criticism by Romney is perhaps the least surprising -- politicians caricature their opponents all the time in campaigns -- but it doesn't suggest a great emphasis on the necessity of diplomacy on Romney's part.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/09/romneys-5-oddest-fundraiser-statements-on-israel-iran-and-peace/262529/
Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
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