Mitt Romney seems to be putting a dent in the Democratic Party’s support coming from Hollywood.
Clint Eastwood made Romney’s day with an endorsement at an Idaho fundraiser on Friday. Robert Duvall is holding a fund raiser for Romney at his home next month where Anne Romney will be in attendance. Neither Gov or Mrs. Romney were present when retired porn star Jenna Jameson announced her support for the Republican presidential candidate at a San Francisco strip club, but Jameson’s remarks to a CBS reporter covering the strip club’s anniversary party have garnered more media coverage than Eastwood’s and Duvall’s endorsements combined.
Eastwood’s endorsement is notable because many in the media spun his Halftime in America Super Bowl commerical for Chrysler as a tacit nod to Obama.
GQ columnist Reid Cherlin says Mitt Romney should pick Governor Chris Christie as his running mate over the “milkiest of milquetoast options,” Ohio Senator Rob Portman or former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty. Hat tip to Bob Ingle.
Yes, I know the criticisms. Chris Christie is a hot-head and a showboat. He’s overweight. He doesn’t represent a key swing state. He’d be uncontrollable, in the way that Sarah Palin was uncontrollable. He’d suck up all the oxygen and leave Romney fiddling in the wings, or worse, cleaning up his messes. All that is true, to a degree.
But let’s remember the other key truism here: people vote for the top of the ticket, not the would-be VP. As you’ve read countless times, the real virtue of the running mate pick is that he can be nastier on the attack, he doubles your capacity for in-person campaigning, and your selection of him says something essential about your judgment. I think Christie would be a win for Romney on all three fronts. He is an excellent attack dog. He lives for town-hall campaigning. And his pick would make loud and clear—to Romney’s still-unenthused Republican critics, and to swing voters who love moderate East Coast Republicans—that he’s serious about kicking ass. Most of all, though, Christie is damn entertaining. He is disarmingly blunt. He’s a ham, he takes tough questions head-on, and he loves the parry-and-thrust that is weaker pols’ undoing. There’s a reason he remains so popular.
The campaign so far has been an utter grind, and Romney’s VP announcement is our last, best chance for an infusion of something fresh, interesting, and new. Please, Governor Romney: I know you’re a businessman above all else. But can’t we all just have some fun for once?
I have to agree. Portman or Pawlenty will put voters to sleep.
I would love Romney to make an “out of the box” VP choice like Condie Rice, Allen West or Marco Rubio. But Rice doesn’t want to do it and probably would not perform well on the campaign trail. West is a patriotic hero but comes across as angry. Angry scares voters. I don’t think Rubio is ready, for the office or for the glare of negative media attention that would come down on him.
No one articulates the case against Obama better than Christie. Christie has a Reaganesque optimism and ability to communicate it in a way that inspires like no one else on the national scene.
Christie will bring an excitement, and fun, to the race that no one else can bring.
If the presidential race keeps going the way its going, voters will tire of the campaign before Halloween. Christie will engage voters more than any VP candidate since Thomas Jefferson and the media won’t get the better of him like they did of Sarah Palin. ( I can’t believe I just put Thomas Jefferson and Sarah Palin in the same sentence.)
Most importantly, with Chris Christie as his running mate, Mitt Romney can win.
Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, says,
President Obama claims his “you didn’t build that” quote has been taken out of context, but as you can see in this video — released by his own campaign — the quote in question is insulting and the context is even worse.
Clearly this President’s whole philosophy on the American Dream is upside down. It’s time to make a change.
Mitt Romney understands success is not the result of government, it is the result of hardworking people who take risks, create dreams, and build lives for themselves and their families.
So if you watch only one video during this election, watch this one. And if you share one video on Facebook, Twitter or email during this election, share this one.
Watch the video, judge President Obama’s mixed-up ideology for yourself, and spread the word:
72 % of New Jersey voters still do not know enough about Joe Kyrillos, thus Bob Menendez has slightly widened his lead in the U.S. Senate race, according to a Qunnipiac poll released this morning.
Menendez favorablity rating remains weak, especially for an incumbent, at 37%-25% with 36% not knowing enough about him to form an opinion.
Barack Obama is leading Mitt Romney in New Jersey by 49%-38%. Romney’s favorability rating is upside down, 35%-43%.
New Jersey voters are split over ObamaCare. 47% favor keeping it, 45% favor repealing it.
Invoking Hillary Clinton from her ill-fated 2008 Democratic presidential primary against Barack Obama, the Romney for President campaign is releasing a television ad today that pushes back on Obama’s claims that Romney outsourced jobs while managing Bain Capital.
President Barack Obama has long tried to distance himself from the “Fast and Furious” scandal at the Justice Department, which stems from a program under which Mexican drug cartels were allowed to acquire U.S. firearms that were later used against U.S. law-enforcement personnel. By invoking executive privilege to stymie congressional investigation of the case, the president has placed himself squarely in the center of it.
President Obama, who had been a bitter critic of the Bush administration’s use of executive privilege, today through his representatives protested that he is only doing what the Bush administration did before him. The same man who once accused President Bush of “hiding behind executive privilege” is now hiding behind George W. Bush.
Executive privilege serves a necessary function in our constitutional order, reinforcing the separation of powers and protecting sensitive deliberations within the executive branch, and it is especially strong when the president or his closest advisers in the White House are involved in the communication. In this case, the administration has long denied that the president was directly involved. Instead, Attorney General Eric Holder wasted everyone’s time invoking a spurious form of deliberative privilege that was completely decoupled from executive privilege. Such a privilege has no force vis-à-vis Congress. By finally invoking executive privilege yesterday, the president belatedly acknowledged that his attorney general was full of it.
Executive privilege has legitimate uses — and illegitimate uses. For instance, it is not intended to be used merely to protect the president from political embarrassment stemming from grievous errors in judgment by members of his cabinet or officers of the departments over which they preside. There is good reason to believe that in this case the privilege is being abused.
