Mother Jones, an extreme left wing website that solicits tax deductiblecontributions to sustain itself, posted a series of videos of Mitt Romney speaking at a fundraiser in the Florida home of private equity manager Marc Leder this past May.
In the first video, Romney speaks candidly about the challenge he faces in the general election. He notes that Obama starts out with a significant advantage…the 47% of Americans who don’t pay taxes and , he says, think health care, food and housing should be provided to them as a government funded entitlement. Romney notes that his challenge is to win over the 5% of Independent voters who like Obama personally but are disappointed with his performance.
Is this “evil”?
Steven Goldstein, the CEO of another non-profit that solicits tax deductible contributions, the same sex marriage advocates Garden State Equality thinks so. I’d link you to Garden State Equality’s website, but Google says the site is dangerous to your computer. Really. On his facebook page Goldstein characterises Romney as evil. He says Romney’s remarks are “one of the most hateful speeches in U.S. Presidential candidate history.”
Now that the Obama administration’s spin that the ongoing anti-American riots in the Middle East that started on September 11 are caused by a reaction to an idiotic video is failing to hold up under scrutiny, the State Department has told reporters to stop asking about the crisis. Most mainstream reporters and media outlets seem to be fine with that.
Have you seen the video? Probably not. According to YouTube’s counter, it has only been viewed 3.6 million times. That may sound like a lot of views. By typical YouTube standards the video is viral. Yet for the supposed impact it has had on the world, the lives it supposedly cost and the news generated about it, the equivalent of less than half the population of New Jersey has viewed it. More people have seen pictures of Princess Kate’s boobs, which were easier to find on the Internet than the video was. I guess it is refreshing to know that the President of the United States has more influence on the media than the Queen of England does.
The Obama campaign is so confident of winning New Jersey comfortably that the prime responsibility of its New Jersey staffers is to recruit volunteers to go to Pennsylvania for the rest of the campaign, according to a high level Democrat who spoke to MMM on the condition of anonymity.
“Menendez will win by at least 10 points,” said the source, “the internal numbers have Obama up by 18 and Menendez up by 12. Elsewhere in the country, the Senate and Congressional candidates are doing better than Obama, but not in Jersey. Menendez needs Obama’s coattails, but he’ll have them.”
The source said Menendez is working harder than he ever has in his life. “He’s out shaking hands with commuters every day at 5:30am and doesn’t stop campaigning until midnight.”
“We don’t see Kyrillos working that hard,” the source said as a dig to the GOP challenger.
Menendez 2012 Communications Director Paul Brubaker has still not called back.
Prior to last month the buzz about Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s future was that he would run for U.S. Senate in 2014, challenging Senator Frank Launtenberg if necessary. Booker opened a federal PAC last year and Lautenberg has been sniping at him ever since.
But in the weeks leading up to the convention Booker met with county chairs to plant the seeds of a gubernatorial run against Governor Chris Christie last year. In Charlotte he went into full campaign mode without making an announcement. In the process he made himself the front runner for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2013. A Booker candidacy for governor will clear the Democratic field. Without Booker in the race there will be a contentious primary. Senators Dick Codey, Barbara Buono and Steve Sweeney could be contenders. Assemblymen John Wisniewski and Lou Greenwald are acting like candidates. Elizabeth Mayor Chris Bollwage says he will run if Booker doesn’t.
None of the other potential candidates will be able to gain any traction until Booker makes his intentions clear.
As a nod to Booker’s front runner status, Quinnipiac polled a Christie/Booker match up. Christie won the poll by 7%, but Booker’s name was recognised by 60% of those polled. That is an extraordinary high number for a New Jersey politician who has never run a statewide race. Booker has better name recognition than Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno. He is as well known and better liked than U.S. Senator Bob Menendez.
Booker told the New Jersey delegation in Charlotte that Christie can be beat and that he is only governor because urban Democrats didn’t come out to vote for Jon Corzine in 2009. The implication is that he can get urban voters out, regardless of the desires of Democratic bosses George Norcross in the south and Joe DiVincenzo in the north who didn’t rev their machines for Corzine in 09.
Yesterday in Ohio, in a town called Seaman, Vice President Joe Biden channeled former President Bill Clinton while campaigning in a diner.
I wonder how those biker dudes would have reacted if the Secret Service hadn’t been there. Then again, maybe they were undercover Secret Service agents.
Biden opened his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention with a effusive expression of his love for his wife, Jill. “I love you,” Biden professed to 20,000 in the convention hall and a national TV audience, “you’re the love of my life and the life of my love.”
Bob Woodward’s new book, “The Price of Politics” may do more to threaten President Obama’s reelection than the anemic jobs reports.
Obama may be a great orator with a clever campaign, but Woodward’s book depicts his White House as dysfunctional and disorganized. The president himself is depicted as aloof and unable to develop the relationships necessary to lead the nation. Congressional leaders of his own party, Nancy Pelosi in the House and Harry Reid in the Senate, have little regard for Obama’s leadership abilities.
The book focuses on the debt ceiling crisis that the nation face during the summer of 2011. A crisis that was so serious that “they wouldn’t tell the world how bad in was at the time,” according to Woodward in a interview with ABC’s Diane Sawyer that will be aired Monday night.
As I was reading several reviews of the book I was reminded of Governor Chris Christie’s frequent criticism of Obama’s lack of leadership and inability to work across the aisle. It’s worse than Chrisite imagined. Harry Reid asked Obama to leave the room, at a meeting Obama called of congressional leaders at the White House, so that the congressional leaders could hammer out a deal to avert our nation defaulting on its debt that Obama would have no choice but to sign. Earlier in the Obama administration, Nancy Pelosi muted a conference call from Obama while she and Reid were together working on details of the stimulus package so that the president wouldn’t know that he did not have their undivided attention for his pontification. Clint Eastwood was right. The chair is empty and even the national Democratic congressional leaders know it.
The mainstream media’s coverage of the book may be more damaging to Obama’s reelection chances than the content of the book itself.
Reviews in the New York Times and Washington Post read like the reviewers compared notes before publication. They are trying to suppress sales by depicting the book as boring and a rehash of previous reporting. Yet they have enough integrity to report Woodward’s conclusion:
“It is a fact that President Obama was handed a miserable, faltering economy and faced a recalcitrant Republican opposition.
“But presidents work their will — or should work their will — on the important matters of national business. There is occasional discussion in this book about Presidents Reagan and Clinton, what they did or would have done. Open as both are to serious criticism, they nonetheless largely worked their will.
“Obama has not. The mission of stabilizing and improving the economy is incomplete.”
But ABC is giving Woodward prime coverage of the book on Monday night in a intervew with Sawyer during “World News Tonight” and “Nightline.” Woodward will sit down with George Stephanopolous live on “Good Morning America” on Tuesday, September 11, the day the book is release.
