If you want to know why Romney will be “winning” no matter what actually happens for the next two weeks, perhaps it has something to do with our easily amused Village Idiots like the NY Times’ Ashley Parker.
Mitt Romney will be participating in his own political version of Monday Night Football when he faces off against President Obama in their final debate of the campaign cycle. But on Sunday morning, Mr. Romney took a break from debate preparation to make a stop at a gridiron of a different sort — a flag football beach face-off between members of the news media and members of Mr. Romney’s staff.
Mr. Romney, wearing black shorts, a black Adidas T-shirt and gray sneakers, walked down to the beach after spending the morning at church, and kicked off the game with a coin toss. (The press won that part, with a call of “tails,” prompting Mr. Romney to quip, “That’s the last call you guys are getting.”)
“Let’s see, look at the captain, Gail’s a captain, is that right?” Mr. Romney said, referring to Gail Gitcho, the campaign’s communications director. “Got a bracelet for you.”
Mr. Romney then handed Ms. Gitcho a white rubber bracelet that read, “Clear Eyes, Full Hearts, America Can’t Lose,” an apparent twist on the “Friday Night Lights” motto, which Mr. Romney has recently begun quoting on the campaign trial.
As Steve M. points out, this means Romney has now passed the Very Serious Person test.
Romney is generally getting the benefit of every doubt now. Obama isn’t. For Romney to be hurt by a gaffe (or a poor debate performance) now, it’s going to have to be monumentally bad. He’s going to get a pass on a lot of stuff that would have hurt him a month ago.
Because after all, how can the guy actually be one of those Tea Party nutjobs or an elitist one-percenter if he plays flag football with reporters? He’s an average guy who happens to be worth a quarter of a billion, not like that elitist Obama guy. America’s gonna be fine under President Romney, you guys, he engages his peers in sport! It’s not like the guy is Bush or anything.
Right?
j
He didn’t play a single down. He just did the coin toss. Another phony photo-op, but at least this time the sand won’t lose its funding.
dr. bloor
Short of urinating on stage tonight, Mitt cannot lose. And if he does pee his pants, a substantial portion of the mediots will blame Obama.
Zifnab
Is there something I’m missing with Democrats. Are they incapable of throwing a few cocktail parties and BBQs for reporters? If it is that easy to win over the DC press corps, I get the feeling Obama would have done it by now.
Lulwhut? The media loved Bush. He was all rugged and strong, out on the ranch clearing the never-ending supply of brush.
I just think you might be looking at this a bit backwards. Reporters that fawn over a candidate get access. Reporters with access get promotions. Reporters that get promotions dictate the agenda. Romney isn’t doping these people. They know exactly who he is. They just don’t give a shit because – hooray! Free hot dogs and lemonade everybody!
That’s just how the courtier class rolls. Hell, swing down to FOX News and half the pundits are ex-politicians to begin with. They absolutely know how to go along to get along.
j
@dr. bloor: If he does pee nobody would know. (Magic undies, you know).
Steve
Flag football? So now he’s Jack Kennedy?
Turgidson
Yep, as Krugman said about Bush/Gore, the media has taken sides. The first debate gave them the reason they needed to paint Obama as a loser and they are gonna hang onto that bone to the bitter end.
The narrative is still “ROMNEY SURGING” even though the non-Gallup polling shows a small Obama national lead, Obama’s midwestern firewall holding, VA as a coinflip, Obama slightly ahead in CO, and FL close enough to go either way if OFA is as good as they’re supposed to be at turning its voters out.
But they’ve decided. Obama = loser; Romney = comeback specialist who can’t lose.
Thankfully Obama isn’t Gore and I still think he’ll pull it out.
Cliff in NH
ibtimes.com/friday-night-lights-creator-requests-romney-cease-desist-use-clear-eyes-full-hearts-cant…
– snip –
dr. bloor
BTW, this is particularly fucking galling since he’s been asked not to use that phrase. His campaign is also trying to make money off it.
I’m sure the “journalists” were too busy running post routes to fucking notice it, though.
(Edit–Shakes fist at Cliff)
Cacti
@Zifnab:
Who could forget the “ranch” in Crawford, that had neither horses nor cattle, and that Dubya ditched immediately after leaving office.
NotMax
Excerpted from New Yorker‘s eloquent and ringing endorsement:
Linda Featheringill
During the “debate” tonight, appearances will be very, very important, probably more important than actual facts.
Some facts will stick in the minds of the casual viewer. Obama did get OBL. We did leave Iraq [never mind who negotiated the time]. We have a pull down schedule for Afghanistan.
Big issues like war and peace are important to nearly everyone. But a lot of the subtleties of foreign policy will not seem important to the average voter. They’ll be more interested in how “presidential” Obama looks.
Lancelot Link
Are they incapable of throwing a few cocktail parties and BBQs for reporters?
If Obama threw a barbecue, he would be assailed from now until the election for doing something so trashy and vulgar on the taxpayer’s dollar (even if it weren’t) instead of concentrating on his job.
We would hear about nothing but “barbecuegate” for the foreseeable future.
The ones who ate the most barbecue and swilled the most booze would be the ones whining the loudest.
You know this.
tulip
@Zifnab:
This. This is just how they roll, suffering for the majority of folks, who gives a shit cause it don’t affect them.
I almost hate the enabling media class as much as I hate the fucking 1%.
karen marie
And the press? They’re fine with that. They’re much happier when all they have to do is stenography.
beltane
@Zifnab: Our lapdog media is so pitiful their favors can be bought with a Vienna sausage. It’s one thing to be a whore, another thing to be a cheap whore.
General Stuck
I don’t think it is particularly ideological, with some notable exceptions. I think it is nothing more than the gods of commerce taking their rightful place in our news business, especially the moving picture kind. And that is amplified by the digital age and the internet into a swirling mush of personal and corporate interest. Public interest doesn’t pay the bills, and that matters when there are a gazillion competitors to sell their sound bytes to the masses, instead of three stodgy networks who could mock the bidness gawds and get away with it when it came to presenting news as a true public service, and not just another commodity feeding the capitalist dragon.
Think of it as a snake eating its tail, and going back for seconds.
4tehlulz
10bux sez Mittens goes here tonight.
(Not for sqeamish and probably nsfw)
Comrade Jake
Well one thing we know they didn’t do: hang out to drink beer and eat hot dogs with the candidate afterward. Because Romney doesn’t drink.
Interesting that the whole “who would you rather have a beer with” question has been MIA this campaign season.
kay
This makes me sad but I saw it coming when they started reporting that Romney was delivering beef jerkey to them.
Adorable, diminutive nicknames are next, plus “favorites”
He’s the daddy.
Culture of Truth
The media needs the race to be tied; failing that, it’s a better story if Romney is winning.
His ridiculous lie caught in real time during the last debate was met with a new round of swooning over Mitt by the media. Romney will be declared the winner tonight (by all but MSNBC, possibly) no matter what he says or does. If he says something incredibly stupid (like last time) it will be ignored. He does tend to put his foot in it, and normal humans may notice, so there is that.
srv
Obama never played a team sport, that’s why he just doesn’t have the experience to bring Washington together to win the future.
j
Mitts spokesman Dan Senor was on NBC this morning and he hinted that Mittens was going to try to replicate the first debate strategy of inundating Obama with a mountain of non-stop BS and lies so Obama could never catch up with all the flip flops and non-truths.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
As gawd-awful as this is, and it really just points out how useless the media is (except for Soledad O’Brien), just remember how well the tire swings and BBQs worked for McCain.
Redshift
@Cacti:
And that he bought just before running for governor.
Chris
@Zifnab:
Reporters are wary of doing anything that paints them as pro-Obama, accurate or not, because they already have a reputation as “liberally biased” in most of the public. No such problem with favoring conservatives.
Besides, Goopers have been on top for the last thirty years or so, and they prefer to be on the winning side.
Bighorn Ordovican Dolomite
Well, if you didn’t already want to open a vein–here’s the important correction:
At least the Times had the integrity to clear that up! :rolling eyes:
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Zifnab:
Zifnab is spot on. The BBQ and tire swings are symptoms, not the disease. The disease is that to our press overlords, Republicans are winners (and it certainly doesn’t hurt that they look, act and talk like me and my exurban friends and neighbors). Democrats are losers and strange and live in some other lower-rent neighborhood, and nobody likes people like that.
The denizens of The Village are every bit as tribal as the most red-blooded teapartying Kansas voter, they just have a more sophisticated way of expressing it.
ETA: and the only cure for the disease is for Dems to win multiple elections in a row and dominate both Congress and the WH for a long-enough streak to put a big dent in the careers of those Villagers who don’t suck up to Dems when they are in power.
j
@srv: From the caption of the second picture:
washingtonpost.com/conversations/the-teenage-obama/2012/06/08/gJQA4NlvNV_gallery.html#photo=2
General Stuck
Most people have heard or read about Romney being a filthy corporate swine that will lie cheat and steal to get ahead, or get his self elected, as per the primary. They already knew all that. Just some of them wanted to see him next to Obama to meet some mindless litmus test of viability for a prez. And to make sure Romney didn’t have horns. And was white as people were saying. That was likely all that was in play for the debates, baring a complete meltdown.
Turgidson
@Culture of Truth:
It would take an unbelievably big gaffe for the media to run with it. I mean, the Benghazi faceplant last time got a lot of play on liberal blogs and such, but it didn’t become THE STORY on a broader scale. And that was a pretty epic fuckup. The story was more about whether Crowley had any right to talk back to President-to-be MOTU Mittens than the substance of the event.
Redshift
@j: I thought Obama did pretty well with that in the last debate. Romney was throwing out lies even faster than in the first one, and it seemed to me that it was effective for Obama just to periodically point out when he’d lied, rather than trying to keep up with all of them.
Gindy53
Whoa, now wait one minute, according to my Mormon neighbors he isn’t supposed to be doing any thing like this on Sunday. Hell they can’t even WATCH the NFL on TV let alone play or coin toss for a game.
The neighbors can’t mow their lawn, their kids cannot play outside with the neighborhood kids (Mormon or not), they have to go to church services (3 hours in the morning), and contemplate their service the rest of the day.
Plus this smacks of Bush and his “Watch this drive” shit. Entitled fuckwad all the way.
kay
@j:
Ugh. Dan Senor is just dying to get his hands on an army again.
Dan Senor alone is reason enough not to elect Mitt Romney.
gnomedad
@Lancelot Link:
What do you mean, “if”?
Obama’s Hip-Hop BBQ Didn’t Create Jobs
Cliff in NH
“Romnesia again” is shorter than thats not true you liar…
How drunk will I be if I drink on Romnesia?
Jay in Oregon
@Bighorn Ordovican Dolomite:
That the correction you noted is not an addendum to an article from The Onion makes me die a little inside.
rikyrah
Barack Obama has better things to do than to socialize with them.
Willard and his team have shyt on them the entire election season, and if their stupid asses can be bought by a phony ass game of football..
good for Team Obama treating these clowns like clowns.
Cacti
@Gindy53:
That’s for the hoi polloi of Mormondom.
Famous Mormons play by a different set of rules. Otherwise, Steve Young wouldn’t have had an NFL career.
Another example: it’s a sin for Mormons to look at porn. But it was never a sin for the Marriott family to sell it pay-per-view in their hotel rooms.
NotMax
@Cliff in NH
The core result isn’t the temporary high, numbness and loss of acuity, it’s the consequence of the decade-long hangover which follows consumption.
Drink anything else instead.
Even after-shave. Or ‘squeeze.’ :)
The Moar You Know
@Zifnab: Would work with any other candidate. Not Obama. Woulda backfired because of this goddamned racism this country can’t shake. BBQ? Black people food. Beer? What, was it in fortays? Cocktails? Hey, got some Crown Royal?
God help him if he’d served fried chicken.
This country is full of shitty, small minded jerks who have a president that they absolutely do not deserve. I pray that they all kill themselves after he’s re-elected, but sadly, none of us will be so lucky.
Cacti
@The Moar You Know:
This.
If Obama had a BBQ for reporters, the only question would be how long until Rush asked “who brought the watermelons?”
max
It’s not like the guy is Bush or anything. Right?
Nate Cohn is pointing out at Even the Liberal New Republic:
Basically the Gallup South numbers are freaktastic, but the Northeastern numbers suggest ‘lots of undecideds’. That’s been the thing with Romney all along – everyone in the upper-crust has been going about how he’s the only tolerable Republican, and that’s still his selling point there. I suppose because the NE types are used to rich douchebags, I guess. (Scott Brown!)
{shrugs} So the downshift in the polling is mostly due to white people from the northeast, and I have no idea what to do about that, but it certainly explains the multi-year long press love affair with the guy. I don’t expect it will matter in the end, but until the end we got to listen to this bullshit.
max
[‘I am fully expecting everyone to be shock at the pillorying Mitt gets for losing, particularly from the press.’]
j
@Redshift: He bought it when running for President, because “Reagan had a ranch, why can’t I? It’ll look good” . The last nails were pounded in on the same day the Supreme Court stopped the vote count. BTW, it was built by a religious cult (using slave labor) and has a life-sized stone sculpture/portrait of ‘W’ dressed as an Arabian Oil Sheik on one of the walls.
steveaudio.blogspot.com/search?q=bush+ranch
(Skip the first 2 paragraphs, about Edwards’ hair_.
The “ranch” also has a huge multi-gallon cistern and thick stone walls. It is built like a fortress or a bunker.
And he never set foot in it again after 1-20-08.
The Sailor
@tulip: “I almost hate the enabling media class as much as I hate the fucking 1%.”
The media class is the 1%, or very close to it.
The Moar You Know
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Nope.
Dems won six presidential terms, owned the legislative body by margins upwards of 70%, ended the Great Depression, killed Hitler, won WWII, and the fucking country handed the keys right back to the GOP as soon as they ran someone who could wear his medals properly.
There is no cure.
NotMax
@The Moar You Know
Schoolmarmish nitpick: Hitler committed suicide.
geg6
@The Moar You Know:
Really? All the biggest tea bagging white assholes I know drink Crown. It’s huge here among that crowd. That and Maker’s Mark.
mark
“wearing an Adidas t-shirt”…? If the Dems played politics like the Repubs then they would be all over him for wearing a t-shirt made by a German company that was founded by ex-Nazi’s
Mnemosyne
@max:
I dunno — mathematically what he says makes some sense since Obama would have a hard time getting even fewer votes in the South than he did in 2008, but he doesn’t seem to have any actual, yanno, data to back it up. He says “state polls” but doesn’t actually link to any. It sounds like he’s extrapolating (ie guessing) based on his feelings and maybe some old polls he didn’t link to.
Chris
@max:
There’s a class of people in the Northeast that’s disgusted by what the “mainstream” of their party has become, and is longing for the return of Reasonable, Clean-Cut Good Republicans. They project Romney into that role.
(Big, heavy dose of “socially liberal but fiscally conservative” crap amongst these people).
@The Moar You Know:
What you said.
Really, if the twenty years of New Deal, contrasted with GOP policies that caused the Great Depression and prevented any action on WW2 until it was too late, couldn’t end the Republican brand, I don’t know what the fuck can. And we’re unlikely to ever get a winning streak as impressive as the twenty years of FDR/Truman again.
Baud
@max:
Ezra mentioned that employment gains have been soft or negative in the NE recently so maybe that’s contributing to the undecideds.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@The Moar You Know:
We are talking about two different things. You are talking about the voters, I’m talking about bias in the establishment press. The Eisenhower-era establishment press was liberal in their bias, at least compared with their pre-FDR and post-Nixon counterparts. Bias in the establishment press against conservative Republicans helped contribute to Eisenhower’s surprise victory over Taft at the 1952 GOP convention. If you read accounts of press coverage during the couple of years leading up to and including the 1964 Johnson-Goldwater campaign the MSM bias against Goldwater also stands out like a sore thumb. Having said that, the press wasn’t so much liberal in those days as they were pro-establishment. Given that the establishment consisted of conservative Dems + liberal and moderate Republicans, this benefited both Dems specifically and liberals more generally.
ruemara
@Zifnab: Good god man. Obama has done, and did everything you are talking about. From the first month on out.
gnomedad
@j:
See, if Obama had a sense of humor, he’d have one of these made and everyone would have a good chuckle.
ThresherK
@beltane: Cheap, indeed.
To top off the old joke, we know what the press are. To add insult to injury, they also suck at negotiating over the price.
Seanly
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, finding out facts is hard. Making up crap so you can make the flag football game in time for the coin toss is easy.
I love that Mitt showed up in athletic gear for a coin flip & then left and the media still fawned all over him.
Clockwork
Now that they think Romney has a decent chance of being President it’s time to play nice and start thinking about Presidential access and who knows, maybe even a White House gig.
If America falls the role the media played is going to be square in the middle of it’s ruins.
RaflW
For all the pasta in heaven, we’re f*cked.
I used to actually like to read newspapers, and I thought Charlie Rose was an oasis of sensibility in a desert of TV.
But now that I know all the shit I know about a fleet of 50 stupid Halperin-wannabes all prancing about as if they’re the most important people on earth?
F*cktasm, man.
RaflW
@NotMax:
Oh. Mah. God. Boooor-ING. We want a War, dammit! (OK, not what the citizens are saying, but what the Village is projecting).
How fucking soon after Mitt has utterly botched the Mid-East, and 1,000+ of our men and women are dead or have TBIs and multiple amputations will the media again apologize to the American people for totally going in the tank for a warmongering Republican dolt!?
Gaaaah!
kay
I remember laughing out loud at one of the 2008 debate moderators. I don’t remember his name, but he’s “serious”. He wears reading glasses.
He asked about capital gains and just went on and on, really needling Obama.
I felt so strongly that he was asking after his own portfolio.
It felt like an imposition, like “why is this Guy crankily and petulantly LOBBYING the candidate on his own taxes?”
g
ho’s he trip up to win?
also, didn’t the author of that “rpoud heart” slogan send a cease & desist?
lamh35
@srv: Obama played basketball ain’t that a team sport or are u snark’n
j
@gnomedad: And he’d put it in the East Room.
Of course his Kenyan Tribal Garb portrait would be in the Press Room.
It’s all part of his 11th dimensional mind control Voo-Doo dat he do!