Mitt Romney, former Republican governor of Massachusetts, ran in 2008 but dropped out early. In 2012 he not only defeated his Republican challengers but, nine days before the election, had a 5% lead over President Obama among likely voters according to Gallup.
Romney’s pick for vice president is Paul Ryan, Wisconsin Congressman and fan of Ayn Rand.
Because of the strange way America elects its presidents, Romney could win the most votes from people but still lose. Or he could win but have Democrat Joe Biden as his vice president. Looking at the state polls most likely it will come down to who wins Ohio. Obama leads in most Ohio polls.
Romney was a centre-right governor. Not surprising since his father was one too.
But to beat his Republican challengers, a string of Looney Tunes from the hard right, he positioned himself to the right of them, of people like Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum.
Trouble was, this was never going to fly with mainstream America. No matter: at the debates with the president in October he disowned his hard-right positions like they never ever were. Like people have no memory. Like there is no such thing as Google. Or YouTube.
Romney’s lies have become so bad that even Chrysler and GM have called him out on them, speaking of the “parallel universe” he has entered. Yet that has not stopped him from repeating his lies.
Meanwhile he refuses to make more than two years of his tax returns public. Where are the Birthers on this one?
Romney’s public lies gives his private remarks greater weight. Like when he was secretly recorded saying this:
Forty-seven percent of Americans pay no income tax. So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect. And he’ll be out there talking about tax cuts for the rich. I mean that’s what they sell every four years. And so my job is not to worry about those people – I’ll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
Which supports Obama’s ads that paint him as a rich douchebag.
In a post like this I should list the main policies the candidate stands for. But with Mitt Romney it is hard to tell what they are – other than wanting to become president.
Since he will apparently say anything to win votes, except at the NAACP, the best guide to how he will act as president is to look at his advisers. Most are former advisers of President George W. Bush. So expect Bush II:
- tax cuts for the rich,
- bigger budget deficits (despite his rhetoric),
- appointing right-wing judges to the Supreme Court,
- letting the banks run wild,
- nothing done about global warming,
- nothing done about gun control,
- nothing done about the mass incarceration of black and Latino men,
- nothing done about poverty, racism and inequality,
- blind support for Israel,
- wars overseas,
and so on.
Well, Obama is arguably Bush II, or at least 1.6. But Romney makes Obama look like Jimmy Stewart to his Mr Potter, the evil banker of “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
See also:
- Mitt Romney – written in 2008 when he ran the first time
- Paul Ryan
- the Obama-Romney debates:
- Dan Senor – foreign policy adviser
- Birthers
- Obama is like a different person
Abagond 
In the end, they are all corrupt politicians, anyway. Change comes from the ground up.
Stephanie
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Excellent post =D
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[…] "…at the debates with the president in October he disowned his hard-right positions like they never ever were. Like people have no memory. Like there is no such thing as Google. Or YouTube….Since he will apparently say anything to win votes, except at the NAACP, the best guide to how he will act as president is to look at his advisers. Most are former advisers of President George W. Bush. So expect Bush II: tax cuts for the rich,bigger budget deficits (despite his rhetoric),appointing right-wing judges to the Supreme Court,letting the banks run wild,nothing done about global warming,nothing done about gun control,nothing done about the mass incarceration of black and Latino men,nothing done about poverty, racism and inequality,blind support for Israel,wars overseas" – MORE – […]
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“Or he could win but have Democrat Joe Biden as his vice president.”
Really, this is possible? For the sake of sanity I I hope Obama also wins the popular vote on Tuesday (because he will win Tuesday, that I believe). The last thing this country needs is the birthers/Tea Party foaming at the mouth with rage that Obama “stole” the election.
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Another thing about Mr.Romney. As you said above and in your previous post about him, he doesn’t stand for anything really. During the debates, especially the last one, it seemed he agreed with a lot of what the President said. Couldn’t help but wonder why exactly he is running for the Presidency…
Not having a solid stance on anything makes him a risky candidate. People can justify voting for him by saying he just panders to the base for support but will actually a moderate leader. His governance of Massachusetts supports this claim to an extent, but his constant flip-flopping hurts his moderate “cred”. There’s no telling which way he would go policy wise if he ever gets into office. As you suggested looking at his advisors is a good start.
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I don’t like Romney’s snaky grin, and his eyes lack the luster of humanity.
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Romney and Potter is an inapt comparison. Romney has a record of generosity; Potter did not.
A better comparison: Obama looks like Robert Redford’s character in the 1972 movie, The Candidate
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@Jean
LOL Yes he has this grin he does after he speaks. Usually he will say some one liner GOP talking point, and he will do this thing were closes his mouth and half smiles while looking from side to side and blinking his eyes really quickly…Ugh I hate it so much because he is usually saying some bullshit and is happy that he is clearly getting over on the crowd.
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This is an excellent post. I really don’t like Romney. He is not good for this country.
I am a young Black woman of 17 as well and this election really matters to me because whoever we elect on November 6th is most likely going to determine whether this country goes forward or backward. And this country can’t afford to go backwards, which is what Romney and the Tea Baggers want us to do. They want to bring the 1950s back and we live in the 21th century.
Romney is flip flopping his positions on everything because he is trying to appeal to the rightwing extremists nutjobss who don’t like President Obama in office because President Obama is a Black man. I know this because I am a regular commenter on the rightwing website, Sodahead. Honestly I am thinking of deactivating my account off of Sodahead because I am so sick of the racist and nasty attacks towards President Obama and his supporters on the site. I never knew how nasty, racist and evil MANY White Conservatives were until I joined Sodahead. After the election ends, I am definitely going to leave Sodahead for good because I am so sick of the nastiness and rudeness alot of Conservatives display on the site.
Sorry for the rant. I am expressing my feelings about ALOT of Conservatives and NOT ALL. Not all Conservatives are racist but a lot are.
Anyways Romney is not a good choice for president because he doesn’t have the integrity to stand up to the extremists in his party. He just goes along with them to get elected. Second of all, he doesn’t ”believe” women should have right to contraception. Romney wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment checks etc and most of all, Romney does NOT care about the poor at all. He said so in his 47% remark.50% of Americans are considered and classified as low income or poor. How can he relate to you when he says that you don’t matter to him?
President Obama is not perfect but I think he is the lesser of the two evils.
P.S. My mother is the person who mainly influences my political leanings since I am only 17. Sorry for the rant.
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Black people are survivors. Nothing they do can stop us. I hope Romney wins so the stupid whites blinded by their racism can suffer even more.
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@ Darth71
Your thoughts echo my own. If they’re so desperate to “take their country back”, then let them have it and deal with the consequences of their stupidity. Unless, of course, they vote in Romney and have Congress pass the laws they wouldn’t with Obama. Then the Black man can be vilified and the white savior vaunted once again. I’m through. Completely done. At this point, I’m just waiting on the Second Coming so it can be over with. I’m convinced that some people cannot and will not see the light.
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Romney is a hardcore racist, Abagond what did you mean by this? (Well, Obama is arguably Bush II, or at least 1.6.) ? Um I don’t see it… No way…. Anyhow Romney is a monster
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Excellently done as usual, Abagond.
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”Because of the strange way America elects its presidents, Romney could win the most votes from people but still lose. Or he could win but have Democrat Joe Biden as his vice president.” How is this possible?
As for Romney, he is a joke, I still can’t get over his airplane window gaffe. The whole election seems like a popularity show.
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@ Adeen Danica Mckenzie
“Second of all, he doesn’t ‘believe’ women should have right to contraception.”
The supreme court ruled a long time ago that people have a constitutional right to contraception. So that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the government should force religious organizations to pay for it.
“Romney wants to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment checks etc”
If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011.
“Romney does NOT care about the poor at all. He said so in his 47% remark.”
Romney didn’t say he doesn’t care about poor people. He said he can’t win their votes by promising to lower their taxes because they don’t pay taxes. So his campaign should focus on working and middle class voters instead.
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Romney is a well oiled Mormon machine. He won’t do anything without them waiting in the wings. Romney will have to run his administration as they see fit. Talk about a dead zone.
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In the event of a tie in the electoral college, the House chooses the president and the Senate chooses the vice president:
Republicans have the most votes in the House -> President Romney.
Democrats have the most votes in the Senate -> Vice President Biden.
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@ Jean
I agree. He comes off as a creepy-ass dude. Sometimes you cannot even see his eyes – just two dark holes.
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Kfennec
If you look at the list of Bush II things that Romney would probably do, a little over half of them apply to Obama in terms of his record thus far.
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It’s more than obvious, in my humble opinion, that this nation may need a new form of government if it’s going to survive, and the way things are going now, it doesn’t have a lot of time left. This two-party popularity showdown we have every election year is working less and less for the American people as a whole. It’s no democracy as it is a plutocracy seeped in hypocrisy for bureaucracy. The only winners in each election are the 1%, as they are now called, and Romney is the 1%’s best friend. Plain and simple.
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@ Abagond
“If you look at the list of Bush II things that Romney would probably do, a little over half of them apply to Obama in terms of his record thus far.”
Which ones don’t apply? In my opinion, everything except “bigger budget deficits” and “appointing right-wing judges to the SC” are things Obama did and is likely to do in the future. If you count supporting solar panel technology as doing something about global worming that still makes Obama a Bush 1,7. I think the solar panels are more like a symbolic gesture than an actual countermeasure, but I guess it does count as doing something.
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@ eco
“Which ones don’t apply? In my opinion, everything except “bigger budget deficits” and..”
The national debt is currently 16 Trillion. Bush borrowed 4 Trillion in eight years. And Obama added roughly that much in just the last four. So the national debt is increasing twice as fast under Obama as it did under Bush.
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@ Y
Excellent point.
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@Beetlejuice
“National debt” and “budget deficit” are not the same thing.
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@ eco
The national debt is all the debt owed by the federal government. The budget deficit is the increase in that debt over a particular year. So if the national debt is increasing faster its because the budget deficit is larger.
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@Beetlejuice
“So if the national debt is increasing faster its because the budget deficit is larger”
The deficit is decreasing. The debt is growing fast when compared with Bush, because W’s policies, the wars and the recession made the deficit explode in Bush’s final year, but his previous ones were not that catastrophic. Bush went from inheriting a surplus from Clinton, to having deficits around 200-400 Billion for 7 years and then, when ‘it’ hit the fan, 1.4 Trillion in his final year. Obama is gradually reducing that. He had deficits of 1.3, 1.3 and then 1.1 Trillion in 2012. Arguably it’s possible to reduce them faster, but at least he is cutting them instead of growing expenses like his predecessor.
http://www.davemanuel.com/history-of-deficits-and-surpluses-in-the-united-states.php
I have no idea what kind of website that is, if it’s partisan or not, but the numbers seem to be relatively accurate.
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Romney is a hard core racist because:
Mormons have it embedded in their beliefs. Have a whiff at the youtube feature.
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Robme is a racist, can’t stand him.
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@ eco
The wars and tax cuts increased the deficits throughout Bush’s presidency. And the recession increases the deficit in Bush’s final year. But not by 1.4 T. Plus the recession ended 6 months after Obama took office. So even if Obama had continued Bush’s policies he should have equaled Bush’s deficits not doubled them.
Dick Morris debunked the 1.4 T deficit numbers 3 years ago. To quote…
In 2008, Bush ran a deficit of $485 billion. By the time the fiscal year started on October 1, 2008, it had gone up by another $100 billion due to increased recession-related spending and depressed revenues. So it was about $600 billion at the start of the fiscal crisis. That was the real Bush deficit.
But when the fiscal crisis hit, Bush had to pass TARP in the final months of his presidency which cost $700 billion. Under the federal budget rules, a loan and a grant are treated the same. So the $700 billion pushed the deficit — officially — up to $1.3 trillion. But not really. The $700 billion was a short term loan. $500 billion of it has already been repaid.
So what was the real deficit Obama inherited? The $600 billion deficit Bush was running plus the $200 billion of TARP money that probably won’t be repaid (mainly AIG and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac). That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited.
Then…he added $300 billion in his stimulus package, bringing the deficit to $1.1 trillion. This $300 billion was, of course, totally qualitatively different from the TARP money in that it was spending not lending. It would never be paid back. Once it was out the door, it was gone. Other spending and falling revenues due to the recession pushed the final numbers for Obama’s 2009 deficit up to $1.4 trillion.
So, effectively, Obama came close to doubling the deficit.
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@Beetlejuice
Dick Morris… And what does Hannity think about the deficit?
“That totals $800 billion. That was the real deficit Obama inherited.”
No. That wasn’t the end of the fiscal year. You can’t compare that with a whole year and you can’t say that everything that happened later in 2009 is simply a consequence of Obama’s actions, that this 1.4T was “Obama’s 2009 deficit”.
The Congressional Budget Office predicted in January 2009 that Bush’s deficit for the whole 2009 fiscal year should be around 1.1-1.2T. Obama did add to that and the final number was 1.4T. We can assume that the additional spending was unnecessary and that the 2009 deficit should have stayed around 1.1-1.2T, but then Obama’s first term still looks better than Bush’s, as far as letting the deficit grow goes.
OK, I think it’s obvious that we are not going to convince each other, so we should probably end this. Thanks for the conversation.
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Reblogged this on Mbeti's Blog and commented:
Easy Work – reblogging
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@ eco
My point concerns how the TARP loan was accounted for by the CBO. TARP was signed on Oct 3, 2008. The fiscal year runs from Oct 1 thru Sept 30 so the TARP disbursements add to the 2009 budget deficits. And most of the loan repayments were made in subsequent years so they subtract from the budget deficits for 2010 and later. But most of the TARP loan disbursements and repayments didn’t have any permanent affect on the national debt because they were part of a short term loan.
So the CBO may technically count the TARP loan disbursements and repayments as part of the deficits for those years. But they didn’t have any permanent affect on the national debt.
We can agree on this, right?
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In Romney’s defense, 47% of all of the people in America don’t pay taxes.
20-25% of all Americans are children.
20% of all Americans are retired or have never worked (probably 11-15% are retired, the rest are among the housewives/welfare recipients/disabled class)
7-10% are the immigrants (legal or otherwise) who have only worked in family businesses.
If you assume that there’s some overlap between the categories (legalized immigrant children that become university students, farmers wives who were included in the “joint file, couple” tax forms, subsistence/minimum wage workers, disabled veterans or the congenital invalids…), then 47% becomes a truthy estimate of the percentage of Americans who either avoid paying taxes or *receive tax refunds that exceed their tax burden*.
Truthiness FTW! Or as my grandfather says, “The truth, wrapped in a lie, is still a lie.”
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“So the CBO may technically count the TARP loan disbursements and repayments as part of the deficits for those years. But they didn’t have ANY permanent affect on the national debt.”
I’m not a 100% sure if “any” is correct. It’s safer to say it had relatively very little impact on the debt in the long-term perspective.
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@ eco
Would it have killed you to say, “Yes, I agree that Bush didn’t really add 1.4 T to the national debt” ? :P”
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@beeteljuice: He did ruin your economy. Sorry.
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@ sam
How?
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Abagond, Romney ran for the presidency in 2000, also. 2008 was his second time running.
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@MaMu1977
I don’t think people are disputing the 47% figure so much as his sentiments about those people. In addition to writing them off as people he he doesn’t and shouldn’t care about he insinuated that those 47% were shiftless and their only livelihood was siphoning money from the American taxpayers AKA the 1%.
When I was in high-school I took a job as a cashier at a local grocery store. Most of the people working the front-end were young people, like me, but others were older and had families. Quite a few of those older people were on food-stamps, but they worked 8hrs a day, 5 days a week for little more than minimum wage. They need that government assistance and income tax break to just barely make ends meet. I feel that’s a truer depiction of the 47% than what Mitt Romney was pushing.
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I said in the post:
Rereading this now nearly four years later, the main way Obama’s second term was different than a likely Romney presidency:
1. Some action on global warming.
2. The Iran nuclear deal.
3. Merrick Garland for the Supreme Court: not as hard right as a likely Romney pick – but still not confirmed!
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But had Romney won in 2012, Trump would likely not have had a chance to become president: Romney would probably have won in 2016 and the Democrats in 2020 and 2024. By 2028 Trump would be 82!
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ON THE OTHER HAND, I think there was bound to be a White nationalist Republican candidate by 2040. Better it be someone as brainless as Trump than someone better at carrying it off.
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