Romney 2012?

Romney’s chance to win still only 28%
10/9/2012 7:13pm by John Aravosis 0 Comments Print


Nate Silver, guru of polling over at the NYT, reminds us to keep all of Mitt Romney’s recent polling momentum, post the grand debate, in perspective.

Romney Has a 28% Chance at Victory

Yes, Romney did well during the debate. And yes, it gave him a bump in the polls. So instead of a 13.9% chance of winning before that first debate, Romney now has a 28% chance of winning. That’s a good deal of orward momentum – Nate estimates it as a post-debate bounce of 2.5% – but the bounce may be fading now, and it wasn’t nearly enough to catch up to the President’s lead. A 28% chance of winning is still pretty lousy.

. In the last few days, several such portents have emerged, and if you’re rooting for the Obama campaign, they will have you reaching for the Maalox.

Consider, for example, the anguished acknowledgment of Buzz Bissinger (author of “Friday Night Lights”) that after a childhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where the Republican voting machine levers have rusted from disuse, and after a lifetime of casting Democratic ballots, he is voting for Mitt Romney.

What makes Bissinger’s piece so damaging is that he is not retreating from his Democratic roots, nor even embracing Romney’s policies. Rather, he has concluded that Obama is “burnt-out. ... He is no longer the chosen one.”

Or look at the response of the late-night comedians—one of Obama’s securest bases—skewering his debate performance. From David Letterman to Jon Stewart to Bill Maher to the folks on “Saturday Night Live,” they have subjected Obama to something he experienced in the past only from his most zealous foes: ridicule. It is precisely the last thing the Obama campaign needs right now, as it works to gin up excitement among the president’s supporters, especially among the younger voters, for whom 2008 was a time of passionate engagement.

“Come on,” the reply might be. “These are trivial, insignificant items—nothing of real heft.”

So turn instead to one of the more remarkable pronouncements I have seen in recent years from a prominent American journalist: the remarks of CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan.

In a speech last week to Chicago’s Better Government Association, Logan, who was brutalized by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square last year, painted a frightening picture of the terrain in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya—and accused the Obama administration of soft-pedaling the dangers there. On the heels of her “60 Minutes” report a week ago Sunday, her remarks amounted to nothing less than a frontal assault on some basic assumptions of Obama’s foreign policy—an area where he retains a significant advantage over Mitt Romney.

It is almost unimaginable that Bob Schieffer, moderator of the Oct. 22 foreign policy debate, will ignore the blistering words of his colleague, or that he will not raise his network’s report that security in Libya was reduced just before the attacks there that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens.

What’s significant about these items is that they are not stemming from the president’s ideological or political foes. And they are coming just at the moment when the president’s re-election prospects have been seriously damaged by his own inexplicable debate performance.

Mitt Romney yesterday:

There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.

His campaign two hours later:

Governor Romney would of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.

So Mitt Romney went from "no legislation ... that would become part of my agenda" to "would of course support legislation" in the span of just two hours. Wow. At least when he was governor it took him two full years to flip-flop on his pro-choice pledge.

Here is a new way for Mitt Romney to express an ever-contorted position on abortion rights: “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda,” he told the Des Moines Register today. Not long afterwards, there was an apparent reversal, with his campaign spokeswoman telling the National Review’s Katrina Trinko that Romney would “of course support legislation aimed at providing greater protections for life.” This may not have been an error at all; it may be a semi-clumsy entry in Romney’s long history of telling people what he thinks they want to hear, even if it contradicts what he said before. What’s clear is how blatantly false the statement is on the facts.

Let’s start with “there’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with,” a crafty piece of legalese from a man who doesn’t like to talk about his Harvard law degree. Maybe Mitt Romney has never heard of the 59 votes his running mate, Paul Ryan, has cast against abortion and reproductive rights in 13 years in the House, or the 38 bills Ryan co-sponsored on the same! Maybe he has no idea that if Republicans take the presidency and the Senate, there’ll be very little to stop the uterus-obsessed denizens of the House from getting their dream agenda, including restrictions on abortion, Planned Parenthood funding, and contraceptive access. Perhaps he doesn’t remember that he himself told Personhood supporter Mike Huckabee that he would “absolutely” support a human life amendment. And there’s a chance Romney missed his running mate saying just a couple of weeks ago that the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act would be gone on “day one… I can guarantee you that.” (Then again, why stop there when you’ve already promised to repeal the entire thing?)

The mother of a former Navy SEAL who was killed in the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya last month has asked Mitt Romney to stop recounting a story about meeting the former SEAL, Glen Doherty, at a holiday party a few years ago.

Romney first relayed the story yesterday during a stump speech in Iowa. “ learned about him. He talked about his life. He skied a lot. He had skied in a lot of the places I had and we had a lot of things in common,” Romney said, continuing:


You could imagine how I felt when I found out that he was one of the two former Navy SEALS killed in Benghazi on September the 11. And it touched me, obviously as I realized that this young man that I thought was so impressive had lost his life in the service of his fellow men and women.

Boston’s local NBC affiliate WHDH reported this morning that Doherty’s mother objected to Romney using the story in a campaign speech. “I don’t trust Romney. He shouldn’t make my son’s death part of his political agenda. It’s wrong to use these brave young men, who wanted freedom for all, to degrade Obama,” said Barbara Doherty. WHDH even suggested that it reached out to Romney’s campaign for comment, reporting that “there was no response from the Romney camp.”

Yet Romney used the same story in stump speech today in Ohio.

But Romney’s not only telling the story against the wishes of Doherty’s family, he’s also mischaracterizing his encounter with the former SEAL. According to Glen Doherty’s longtime friend, Doherty said Romney had introduced himself four times in the span of less than 30 minutes, saying it was”pathetic” that Romney didn’t know the two had just met:


“He said it was very comical,” [Doherty friend Elf] Ellefsen said, “Mitt Romney approached him ultimately four times, using this private gathering as a political venture to further his image. He kept introducing himself as Mitt Romney, a political figure. The same introduction, the same opening line. Glen believed it to be very insincere and stale.” [...]

“He said it was pathetic and comical to have the same person come up to you within only a half hour, have this person reintroduce himself to you, having absolutely no idea whatsoever that he just did this 20 minutes ago, and did not even recognize Glen’s face.”

Ellefsen said it makes him “sick” that Romney is using the story out on the stump. “Glen would definitely not approve of it,” he said, adding, “He probably wouldn’t do much about it. He probably wouldn’t say a whole lot about it. I think Glen would feel, more than anything, almost embarrassed for Romney. I think he would feel pity for him.”

Update



A Romney adviser has said that he will “respect the wishes of Mrs. Doherty” and stop recounting the story.

On Tuesday, Romney went off script, in a meeting with the editorial board of the Des Moines Reigster, when he said:


There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.

This of course was a departure from the many promises Romney has made to his party to oppose abortion, support a constitutional amendment banning all abortion, shut down Planned Parenthood, defund health care for women, give employers the right to deny health care to their employees, and appoint activist judges to the Supreme Court who will overturn Roe v. Wade.

His campaign quickly corrected him by saying that of course he would pursue an anti-woman agenda. And, according to TPM, the campaign also called up the anti-abortion advocacy groups to pinky swear that Romney, no matter what he says publicly, is still as virulently anti-woman as possible:


“No alarm bells here,” Tony Perkins, president of the anti-abortion Family Research Council, told TPM on Wednesday.

Perkins said the Romney campaign called him soon after Romney’s remarks were published by the Des Moines Register and assured him it didn’t represent a shift by Romney from his support for pro-life issues.

Well, that's awful thoughtful of the campaign. But, since this is Romney we're talking about, of course the campaign also dished out this whopper:

“As they explained it to me, it was from the way the question was asked,” Perkins said of Romney’s quote. He said the campaign told him the interviewer was “talking about economic issues” when the quote came up.
Suuuure. Romney was answering a question about "economic issues." If only there were some way to verify whether that was true. Oh wait! There is!

Do you intend to pursue any legislation specifically regarding abortion?

Yup, that was the question about "economic issues" that tripped Mitt up. Of course, this was the follow-up question to this original question about "economic issues":

Is there any legislation that you plan to actively pursue in regards to women's issues?

Romney's campaign is just flat-out lying now. To its own base. No wonder the anti-choicers don't really believe he's one of them.

Romney has evidently been turning himself into a pretzel trying to say to women that he has no plans to support any anti abortion legislation and trying to reassure his base that he really meant no such thing.

Quote:

There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.

Romney has evidently been turning himself into a pretzel trying to say to women that he has no plans to support any anti abortion legislation and trying to reassure his base that he really meant no such thing.

do you have any evidence that lying is an ineffective strategy to getting elected??