the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

also is there any precedent for a "apologize to me for saying mean things about my secrets" tack working for a politician?

Bears a weird resemblance to the plot of this season of Parks and Rec but maybe not real life.

“What kind of president would have a campaign that says something like that about the nominee of another party?” Romney said.

― Matt Armstrong, Friday, July 13, 2012 7:37 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

so basically mitt romney is bobby newport from parks & recreation.

"I guess my thoughts on abortion are, you know, let's just all have a good time." -- Mitt Romney

The "humblebrag"; drives me crazy too.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2012/07/barack_obama_told_charlie_rose_he_had_made_mistakes_but_it_was_really_a_humblebrag_.html

gah the term "humblebrag" is so fucking wretched

its a p lame formation but it us usefully descriptive of something people do all the time especially on twitter where it originated

and the humblebrag guys RTS r funny

So did Mitt really just spend a friday night saying Barack Obama is mean and that his secret secrets have no importance in this election?

― da croupier, Friday, July 13, 2012 11:06 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol basically, specifically he also said hes not releasing anymore secrets, i guess why would he when people are being so mean abt the stuff thats already out there

you'd think friday interviews would be a good place to admit to something, forcing obama to wait a weekend to pretend it's a big deal, rather than huffing in disgust that someone would suggest his secrets might be bad secrets and not harmless secrets.

hes obvs going to be forced to release at the v least more tax returns, i have no idea how he doesnt see this

people are going to look back at this period when he wouldnt release his tax returns and everyone was making fun of him for it and say 'the election was lost here' - it may not be technically true but thats what theyre going to say

I have a feeling the Bain thing's going to fade as the tax-return issue replaces it. Bain, besides having happened over a decade ago, strikes me as a murky grey area with just enough wiggle-room that a lot of people will be left shrugging their shoulders. But the tax returns are very tangible if he decides to hold fast to his refusal to release any more. It's very reasonable to wonder what's in there that Romney doesn't want known. (If it's that he's obscenely rich and pays relatively little in taxes, I thought people already knew that by now.)

obama should run an ad where theres the clip of mitt demanding an apology they they cut to a bunch of diff people from all walks of life one at a time going 'awwwwww' and making mocking sadface then at the end it cuts to obama and he goes 'awwwww'

(If it's that he's obscenely rich and pays relatively little in taxes, I thought people already knew that by now.)

― clemenza, Saturday, July 14, 2012 9:17 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

it is this i think but i imagine the specifics of how he did it are quite unsavory, offshore shell companies accounting tricks etc, i mean the one year of tax returns he has released are from after he was running for president and had a chance to clean that stuff up a lil

yeah "referendum of obama" or not, it's just not a matter of people who like obama vs people who don't, but people who like obama enough to vote for him vs people who hate obama enough to vote for the other guy, and ads saying "the president was mean to hilary clinton, and now he's being mean to mitt romney" doesn't strike me as a real base-rallying, dem-humbling move. Other issues will obv come but his current actions just amplify people's awareness that Mitt doesn't want to tell us something.

"referendum on obama," i mean

I'm sure Mark Shields (PBS) is the kind of media guy everyone on here hates, but I've always found him funny. In his segment last night, after a few minutes of dumping on Romney, he said something like "There's one area where I think Romney has a clear advantage in this election." The two people with him stopped talking and listened carefully--this was going to be the standard moment where somebody proved his objectivity by making a concession to the other side. Shields (paraphrase): "We all know the tax code has to be reformed. Well, no one knows more about loopholes and how to game the system than Romney--he can make a very good case that he's the guy to do it."

ha

i like shields grumpy old washington insider persona, its kind of awesome when david brooks tries to argue w/him and hes all com'on son

Here's the clip: go to the six-minute mark.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/politics/july-dec12/politicalwrap_07-13.html

watching mitt on cnn, i had a lil nathan thurm flashback on occasion

obama should run an ad where theres the clip of mitt demanding an apology they they cut to a bunch of diff people from all walks of life one at a time going 'awwwwww' and making mocking sadface then at the end it cuts to obama and he goes 'awwwww'

― lag∞n, Saturday, July 14, 2012 9:19 AM (38 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lmao at this

On the day after Romney took over the Winter Olympics, the Boston Herald reported that “Romney said he will stay on as a part-timer with Bain, providing input on investment and key personnel decisions.”

http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/07/13/evidence-mounts-mitt-romney-continuing-ties-bain-after/w9vGMpkCKg1GaYdaU8l8GL/story.html

i like how a lot of the boston globes reporting on this is just them reading old issues of the boston globe

or reading the boston herald as it were

people are going to look back at this period when he wouldnt release his tax returns and everyone was making fun of him for it and say 'the election was lost here' - it may not be technically true but thats what theyre going to say

this is correct I think - "You get two years of my tax returns & I filed an extension on one so I'll get that to you later" is a really clumsy misread on the tone of this stuff, I think

Sully's been going ham over this for the last two days.

Sullivan going ham is something I can't take seriously after the "Sarah Palin wasn't really pregnant!" mess, dude gets a whiff of some scandal heat on somebody he doesn't like & gets all high-school about it

why does anybody read that dude, idgi

otm

Sullivan going ham is something I can't take seriously after the "Sarah Palin wasn't really pregnant!" mess, dude gets a whiff of some scandal heat on somebody he doesn't like & gets all high-school about it

― perry en concrète (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Saturday, July 14, 2012 10:31 AM (50 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

why does anybody read that dude, idgi

― iatee, Saturday, July 14, 2012 10:34 AM (46 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is why!

• Outsourcing: The Washington Post kicked off a resurgence of Bain-related attacks with a story in June outlining how Bain invested in a number of companies considered “pioneers” of outsourcing. Romney demanded a correction, and his campaign noted that two of the companies in question, ChipPAC and SMTC, were acquired only after Romney’s tenure at Bain had ended. FactCheck.org called ads based on the article an “overreach” in part for the same reason, and claimed a third company, Modus, fell under the same standard since it only offshored jobs after Romney left. Romney’s own signature appears on SEC filings related to ChipPAC in 2001.

http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/07/why-the-timing-of-mitt-romneys-bain-exit-matters-a-guide.php

i was just signing papers! i had no idea what was on them!

hey guys a ceo just signs things and takes the profits, he doesn't actually make any major decisions

btw i should be president because i'm a kickass ceo

he should use that excuse for romneycare too, idk it came across my desk i signed it im just a governor ffs

^^haha A+

Just thinking aloud, as the saying goes.

Premise: Mitt Romney and his handlers are geniuses.
Plan: They know that the tax returns are fairly tepid--a few tax shelters, a lot of income, nothing even approaching the worst presently being formulated. So they withhold them for a while, allowing a frenzy to build up in the media and on the other side (and pushing Bain to the side--unless they're linked, as suggested above). Then they release them, late July or early August. Everyone goes, "That's it?" Media turns on Obama, other side looks foolish and starts to panic.

Jill Stein's Green New Deal:

http://www.jillstein.org/text_psou

thing is just the tiny tax rate romney pays on his huge income is bad enough, theres no way for him to have recent tax returns that dont somehow make him look bad xp

yeah i don't see romney playing rope-a-dope better than obama

"i'm going to let myself look like a secretive shifty out-of-touch plutocrat through primary season and then BAM, records drop, and i'll just be a shifty out-of-touch plutocrat with no secrets, and OWN the narrative."

Again, just throwing something out there, and somewhat facetiously ("Premise: Mitt Romney and his handlers are geniuses"). But that's not exactly what I meant. Elemental rule of "narrative": when something turns out not to be as bad as feared/suspected, it tends to go away.

I'm a little confused as to what Romney is actually going to run on when he has to debate and generally make a broader case closer to the election time. He won't run on Massachusetts, it seems, so he was relying on Bain, but if he can't really run with that now, what has he got? The Olympics?

he's white and he's not Obama. that's all he has, and that's all he ever really had.

I think the Bain thing's still the main thing - he's the guy who comes to your company (or your spouse's company, or your friend's company) and six months later there's redundancies. That has to be pretty visceral for a lot of people.

dude's been running for pres for 7 years. one would think that he & his ppl would've seen fit to tend to all the unseemliness wrt taxes, magical IRA's, offshore accounts etc, regardless of how 'legal' they might be. i mean, even BHO quit paling around w/ terrorists before he mounted his campaign

but as someone suggested upthread, i guess Romney's drive to be POTUS doesn't override his desire to be flagrantly wealthy

Read my lips: no new tax returns.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/angry-romney.jpg

(I haven't come across that elsewhere yet, but I suspect it'll be omnipresent very soon.)

http://www.buzzfeed.com/andrewkaczynski/mitt-romney-at-leisure-12-pictures-from-his-day-o

each of these photos is titled 'thinking abt how to become president'

i love the comments under that story:

Jay Louis · Los Angeles, California
"This is what humans do to appear having fun... I must mimic these recreational rituals since there are cameras nearby..."
Reply · 5 · Like · Follow Post · 21 minutes ago

Peacocks & Lilies
Sore loser. Well, you will be come November.
Reply · Like · 11 minutes ago

http://i50.tinypic.com/6y060i.jpg

pic reinforces my belief that mitt has too many grandkids to successfully be president. you know someday he'd invite all of them to the white house for a visit and they'd just wreck the place, pantsing foreign dignitaries and making prank calls from the red phone while mitt just scratches his head ruefully.

they are not regular children tho, they are mormon children