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Via NYMag’s Daily Intel. “I’m getting better… I will return.”
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Any Arizonans want to tell us about potential candidates who could keep her seat in the (D) column now?
Proud to Be A Democrat
Money Bomb: Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2012!
I would be remiss not to highlight today’s fundraising appeal for Warren’s campaign. From the website:
Scott Brown is celebrating the two-year anniversary of his election today — and we’re fighting back by launching a money bomb to stand up and show the power of Elizabeth’s grassroots support.
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Elizabeth’s campaign has lots of grassroots momentum — but Scott Brown still has a two-to-one cash-on-hand advantage, with millions of dollars more from Karl Rove’s Crossroads GPS, the Chamber of Commerce, and other Wall Street interests waiting in the wings…
Balloon Juice also has an ActBlue page for Warren, though I don’t know whether contributions there will be credited towards today’s money bomb.
Who’s up for the opposite of a drinking game for tonight’s GOP debate? Maybe hit the tip button every time Newton blows his dogwhistle, or Willard describes himself as ‘trustworthy’, ‘faithful’, or ‘happily married for 25 years’? (Even at a buck a hit, that should get us past the million-dollar mark by around 8:45pm…. )
Money Bomb: Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2012!Post + Comments (82)
Romney, “Job Cremator”
(via Greg Sargent)
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I {heart} DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. From Benjy Sarlin at TPM:
… “I would not put the cart before the horse and define [Romney] as an unambiguous frontrunner,” DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told TPM in an interview at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He’s coming off what at some point probably won’t even be defined as a win in Iowa where fewer voters came out for him than came out in 2008.” She added that anything less than 50% in New Hampshire should be interpreted as a sign of weakness given his close ties to the state.
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Nonetheless, as polls show Romney threatening to secure the nomination early, Democrats are unveiling new campaigns to try to define his business experience as more Gorden Gekko than Steve Jobs. Party officials have been holding press events in Iowa and New Hampshire with Randy Johnson, a worker who was laid off from his job at American Pad and Paper under Bain Capital’s management in the 1990s, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Bain’s layoffs under Mitt Romney will be a critical part of their general election strategy should he win the nomination. Romney says that his opponents are cherry-picking his failures and ignoring success stories like Staples, but his campaign has been unable to substantiate its claims that he created net jobs and critics note that even some of Bain’s failures ended up creating a profit for Romney and his fellow investors through consulting fees and dividends.
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“Mitt Romney, I think, is more of a job cremator than a job creator,” Schultz said. She added: “He was a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas. That’s not a record to write home about, that’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s something voters need to know.”
Open Thread: Romney the Uncanny
It was a cold grey pre-spring morning early in 2002, and I was one among the hordes migrating through the Back Bay (subway, commuter rail, and intercity bus) terminal. Suddenly a tall humanoid in an expensively-tailored dark tweed business-capitalist overcoat lunged into my meagre personal space and thrust a dark-gloved hand towards my throat. When I automatically pulled back, he bared his top-quality-dental-hygiene teeth in a primate threat gesture possibly intended to mimic a smile. Two or three much younger, smaller drones in cheap knock-off overcoats immediately rushed over and carefully guided the tall humanoid away from me and towards another potential target. One of the little drones tarried to look back at me, arrange his shiny happy features into a frowny-face, and hiss, “That was Mitt Romney! He’s going to be your next Governor!”
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Half-awake and running late, I was still sufficiently curious to tarry a few minutes to watch the worst approximation of the standard political grip’n’grin I have ever seen. Even when his entourage of young Mormon missionaries formed an advance guard, every third or fourth innocent passer-by (both genders and a wide range of ages, skin tones, and apparent income levels) shied away from Romney like they’d just read Gavin de Becker. He exuded the polar opposite of charisma.
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That was my first, and please goddess my only, personal meeting with Willard Mitt Romney. I’ve witnessed equivalent events for both John Kerry and Michael Dukakis, and neither of those famously un-gemultlische individuals inspired the same visceral negativity from random citizens — general or specific anti-political animus, yes, but people weren’t pulling away from Kerry (who was also very tall & expensively dressed) like he’d tried to grope them.
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It’s not going to be hard for President Obama’s re-election committee to make Romney seem unlikable. He is unlikable. The best his political supporters have been able to manage are variations on Wilde’s quip about GBShaw: “An excellent man; he has not an enemy in the world, and none of his friends like him.” The more time professional politicians and political operatives — not among the world’s most sensitive individuals — spend with him, the less they like him. The Media Village courtiers, however dutiful their attentions to their own paychecks and perquisites, have not been and will never be enthusiastic about their chances to share a non-alcoholic beer or customized-Range-Rover tire swing with “Mitt”. Of course, conventional wisdom is that he gets a minimum forty percent of the votes just by having that ( R ) after his name (although if anyone can break through that floor, it’ll be Romney). And there’s the overlapping twenty-seven percent that won’t vote for an African-American/a Democrat/their own best interests. But making Romney “appealing” to the notorious Low Information Voter is going to cost the Rethug political machine many, many precious millions of dollars… thrown down a sinkhole.
More of This, Please
Greg Sargent at the Washington Post highlights the Obama administration’s response to Romney’s craven defense of his fellow One Percenters:
[Wednesday] Romney denounced the Cordray appointment as “Chicago style politics at its worst.” The Obama campaign responds:“Mitt Romney today stood with predatory lenders and Republicans in Congress over the middle class. He doubled down on his promise to eliminate the Wall Street watchdog and allow Wall Street to write its own rules again, leaving consumers vulnerable to hidden fees, financial traps and excessive risk taking that will hit their pocketbooks. Governor Romney has made clear he has not learned the lessons of the economic crisis, instead, he’s giving the most irresponsible financial actors a bright green light to pursue profit at any cost to communities across America.”
Note the mention of “Republicans in Congress.” Dems know it’s imperative that they prevent the eventual nominee from achieving separation from the unpopular Congressional GOP and its policies.
There is a sidebar poll asking “Has Mitt Romney locked up the Republican nomination?“. Responses, as of pre-dawn Thursday, are running 71% against.
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: “Rickrolled”
Dave Weigel at Slate discusses “three lessons from Iowa“:
Lesson One: The Tea Party isn’t a small-government-first movement…. Sixty-four percent of caucus-goers called themselves “Tea Party supporters,” and 30 percent of them backed Rick Santorum — a social conservative who proudly defended his earmarks. Rick Perry, who campaigned desparately on the issues Tea Partiers say they care about — no earmarks! Term limits! Part time Congress! — got 14 percent of this vote. Michele Bachmann got 9 percent of it.
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Lesson Two: Money is speech, which means people can ignore it. Michael Li was the first to calculate how much the candidates spent for every vote. Santorum spent $1.65 per vote. Rick Perry spent $817…
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Lesson Three: Republicans aren’t so excited about 2012…
Ya think? More at the link; also, those precious votes cost Romney $113.07 each, which is pretty spendy for a race in which Willard’s handlers claimed he wasn’t really competing. I gotta say, seems to me, it’s all good news for President Obama!
So, what other encouraging news is on the agenda today?
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: “Rickrolled”Post + Comments (67)
Late Night Open Thread
(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
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Per TPMLivewire, Willard Romney, Richard Santorum, and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz all took victory laps tonight.
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Rick Perry, on the other hand, may be reduced to campaigning for the VP slot, after “one of the most swift and complete collapses in primary history“.