Recently, I said this to a friend “Mitt Romney is perpetually one sentence away from destroying his campaign.” Mittens proved me right this week. More on that downstream.
Here’s what’s of note now: Romney’s blunder has barely been touched by the mainstream media. This is more interesting than the blunder itself. Coverage of Romney hasn’t been glowing, but it hasn’t been horrendous either. It’s mostly been silly with a whiff of desperation. A “serious” piece showed up in the Washington Post about an ugly Romney high school prank that apparently didn’t bother the now deceased “victim”. The story itself bothered the family of the man pranked far more than the prank. It’s hard to imagine the same story surfacing in 2008 without weeks of breathless follow ups about Romney’s monstrous – MONSTROUS!!! – behavior!
Of course, Obama’s team won’t let tales of Bain Capital’s allegedly brutal treatment of workers die. No one seems to care and the blow back has been substantial. Unlike 2008 the old guard media is not taking its cues from Chicago. Yet.
Thus far, coverage of Romney is perfunctory which in many ways perfectly reflects his campaign since he became the presumptive nominee: Perfunctory. Romney is saying what he excepted to say, has yet to announce an animating core theme, and spends much of his time raising money. Romney’s campaign is cautious, another solid modifier for the MSM’s coverage of it – cautious. This invites the obvious questions. Has the media turned on Obama? Or: Have they realized how obviously pro – Obama they’ve been and plan on pulling the trigger on Romney later in the cycle?
Beat’s me.
I do know that Romney announcing in Iowa that the Federal Government ought to cut first responders is a political blunder of the same magnitude as Obama’s recent blunder. It may be that the media was so preoccupied with Obama’s gaffe that Romney’s was missed. Perhaps Romney’s goof will be rolled out in the upcoming week. It was a stupid remark. Beyond stupid. And exactly the kind of remark that plagued him during the primaries. I’m moderately shocked that I’ve not seen more blue-in-the-face MSNBC anchors. So far the response has come from the Obama campaign, not its media satellites.
Both Obama and Romney made mistakes this week that will haunt their campaigns. Is the media going soft on Romney? Or are they just – finally- sick of Obama?
That’s not quite what Romney said.
Doesn’t sound like much of a gaffe to me. At any rate, the decision to hire fire fighters, police officers, and teachers should be made at the local level. How the hell is any President supposed to know which towns need more cops and which towns have more than enough?
I hear/see nothing wrong with that statement. It’s empty pandering blather of course, but it is not a gaffe or blunder.
I agree with myiq and Jen re what Romney said and why it shouldn’t matter. But, I take your point, JWS: the soundbite was terrible.
I think the media are starting to tire of Obama and his lying henchmen. It’s not much more than a trickle of jadededness so far, but it could become a tidal wave as his numbers continue to decline. At the end of the day, the media doesn’t like a loooooser.
After the mess that David Axelrod made of the questions from Candy Crowley, I HOPE the MSM is becoming tired of TehOnce and his henchmen.
http://tinyurl.com/6orurl7
Leslie, for real! Talk about making a bad situation worse! They’re both bumblers!
A. There was nothing wrong with what Romney said.
B. The Obamedia did try to make something of it, with language similar to yours, John, that Romney wants to cut teachers (!) and firemen (!!) and policemen (!!!). That’s not what he said but it’s how the Obamedia framed it.
C. Romney’s right that the message from Wisconsin is taxpayers want tax relief, they want this madness to end, and if that means not hiring more people then so be it. (I’m not saying this is a wise solution to rising taxes, but that is the message from Wisconsin and, politically, Romney’s got it right.)
D. People aren’t listening as much to the media. They’re bored of the mischaracterizations and the constant Breaking News! that isn’t. MSNBC and CNN are no longer go-to places on the dial for a lot of people, just as we let our subscriptions to Time and Newsweek and The New York Times lapse. It’s not that the media has backed off its Obama propaganda, it’s that three years ago they had the wind at their back and now they’re pissing into the wind.
I certainly agree with points A-C. I hope point D is correct. I can never be certain if something is true because that’s what I feel/think or if it is true because it is true.
Leslie, that’s true. Still, reports I’ve read recently indicate cable news ratings are down, and the CNN/MSNBC numbers are (to me anyway) surprisingly low:
The traditional media bought into the permanent Democratic majority hype in 2008. It was obviously wrong as evidenced by 2010 but it has taken them this long to figure it out. Obama is falling fast in the polls with five and a half months to go and while Romney is bad he is not awful. Obama was seriously over-exposed because the media thought he was so wonderful while the majority of the country thought meh. Obama was supposed to have the most brilliant PR/marketing/campaign staff of all time. They are trying to use the 2008 template again but when you are selling crap it only works once. The scandals are mounting. The inside the beltway types have not been especially alarmed with Solyndra or Fast and Furious because they saw them as ideological and somehow unimportant, but the new one is about national security leaks (treason anyone?) which is the ultimate taboo in DC. The media has already lost an enormous part of their audience but siding with security leakers may be a bridge too far for even them. Obama is facing a perfect storm of scandal, horrific economy, and a frightened press. I swear I did not start out trying to use movie titles in this post.
tales of Bain Capital’s allegedly brutal treatment of workers
It’s not really allegedly…Here’s one article: http://www.alternet.org/story/155638/how_romney_and_bain_capital_bankrupted_one_firm,_fired_all_its_workers,_and_pocketed_$100_million
The article says “22 percent of the companies it invested in went bankrupt or closed within eight years.” Maybe that’s good in that line of business. Maybe the other 78% of their deals are redemptive. But why do any vulture deals if you’re good at doing real deals? In the vulture deals, the taxpayer picks up the tab for the ruins, which seems to me to be at odds with an anti-socialist ideology.
I don’t think Romney’s remarks were anything more than banal, which is his m.o. much of the time.
Banal beats bullying, obfuscating, and ‘neener neener’ every time.
Romney will have to consider every word for its’ negative spin potential, considering the pravda type media we now enjoy. He even needs to take care in asking “where’s the men’s room ?” an obvious racist, and vulture-like question.
leak news:
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-TV/2012/06/10/Exclusive-Caddell-Names-Tom-Donilon-As-Source-For-Leaks
Donilon’s wife was Jill Biden’s Chief of Staff for a while. Why the second lady needs a C of S. is beyond me.. but it does sound better than ‘secretary’ which she probably does need,however it wouldn’t pay as well.
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I’m shocked, I tell you shocked.! And he did this all by himself, just because he could !
The real villains are masters at leaving no fingerprints. They’ve done it for years in Chicago.
Suddenly, I feel sorry for Blago.
Because I’m not ‘doing politics’ on Facebook anymore:
I wonder if Obama used his Nobel Peace Prize to hold down the NDAA when he signed it?
ROFL!
Jay, I’m so glad I didn’t buy any FB stock, I mean without you, where’s the fun ?
ps have never done FB, nor do I recognize a tweet from a twat, almost always forget my mobile phone too. Unimaginable, but true. Sometimes it’s nice to just ‘float’ knowing you are unreachable, for an hour or two.
Did he have his feet up on the Resolute Desk when he signed the NDAA ?
You want to know the dirty little secret about Greece? More than 50% of the Greek workforce is employed by the government & the private sector (industrialization, etc just about everything but shipping & tourism) sucks & couldn’t support the public sector. That’s why Greece had to keep on borrowing money, to keep paying for the public sector workers.
Obama said exactly what he meant in the press conference *he* called, without any actual *news” to announce — the private sector is doing fine, it is the public sector that is weak. He plainly stated — and reiterated again when he tried to walk back the “private sector is fine” line later that day –that we need to hire more public sector employees, even though that would mean borrowing more money to support same, as the private sector can’t support it (hence, the alleged purpose of the stimulus). That’s Obama’s plan on how to fix this economy.
You either agree with that or you don’t.
Romney & the GOP don’t. What Romney said wasn’t a gaffe either — like Obama, Romney said what he meant: that he doesn’t think the way to fix the economy is to hire more workers in the public sector by giving state & local governments fed money (which at this point has to be borrowed money) to hire more government workers. (And myiq is right — despite the Dem spin, which is especially laughable given Jay Carney’s lecturer today that we need to report things “in context” — Romney did not say he wants first responders fired, which isn’t the purview of the federal govt. anyway. He plainly said hiring *more* isn’t the way to fix the economy).
This is a matter of what economic philosophy you ascribe to, not Obama or Romney “misspeaking.” It is also a matter of people not understanding the difference between the public sector jobs & the private sector jobs — yes, public sector employees pay taxes, but their wages are paid for with taxes. The same isn’t true about wages in the private sector.