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

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

they would probably all just play hide n go seek and then eat jello

So, this new thirty-second ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ud3mMj0AZZk

Kinda left blue-balled by the fade out on the song tbh

Audacious...They're trying to get inside Romney's head, and, judging by Friday's freak-out, so far it's working. I don't know, though. It all makes me think of some line from Sweet Smell of Success that I can't track down--something Hunsecker says about walking blind without a net underneath.

Watched that ad a few times. It feels like they're dropping the bomb on Romney. When his voice breaks on "America, America" it's napalm in his face.

ha thats so mean using his bad singing

lol

“Every day, President Obama hits a new low. It is sad and shameful that President Obama would mock America the Beautiful,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. “But sadly, it’s not surprising for the man who launched his presidency with an apology tour. The ‘Uncle Jims’ of our country – as he condescendingly calls middle-class Americans – don’t believe in mocking America the Beautiful and don’t believe in apologizing for America.”

what

uncle jims?

When talking about his plan to extend the Bush tax cuts for people making less than $250,000 a year, Obama blamed the network for contributing to misperceptions of his tax policy as president. He chose “Uncle Jim” as a random example of the average Fox News viewer.

“Uncle Jim, who’s a little stubborn and been watching Fox News, he thinks somehow I raised taxes,” Obama said. “Let’s just be clear — I’ve lowered taxes since I came into office.”

“Uncle Jim, who’s a bit of a dick and been watching Fox News, he thinks somehow I raised taxes,”

maybe google knows?

Uncle Jim's Worm Farm
unclejimswormfarm.com/
Uncle Jim has buy red wigglers, can o worms online and more.

Uncle Jim - Jim Mayer - Rocks!
www.unclejimrocks.com/
Uncle Jim Mayer writes children's music along with being part of Jimmy Buffett's Coral Reefer Band.

Uncle Jim's
www.unclejims.com/
Jan 23, 2005 – We have been sandcarving for about 25 years, mostly on redwood. Recently we have started sandcarving crystal, glass, and ceramic ...

why does obama hate worms, jimmy buffett, and sandcarving

why do you hate singing, Obama?

they really legitimately are going w/"He's making fun of America the Beautiful" tho

the anti-Romney ad is basically the John Kerry waterskiing ad, they must haaaaate this a lot

“Every day, President Obama hits a new low. It is sad and shameful that President Obama would mock America the Beautiful,” Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul said. “But sadly, it’s not surprising for the man who launched his presidency with an apology tour. The ‘Uncle Jims’ of our country – as he condescendingly calls middle-class Americans – don’t believe in mocking America the Beautiful and don’t believe in apologizing for America.”

Michelle Bachmann-esque.

Unmistakable how two of the three Republicans on This Week's panel this morning--Will and Dowd--treated Romney's tax-return stonewall with exasperation bordering on disgust. Dowd suggested it was karma, after Romney used the same tactics to bring down Gingrich and Santorum--and said "There's obviously something there."

Mary Matalin...stayed strong.

http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/roundtable-week-politics-16781610

lol will carville and brazile are such amazing characters to watch work, theyre like political muppets or something

stephanopoulos is so plush

matalin is a lil too freaky, dowd has no glow have no idea what hes even doing there

lol dowd prefacing his comment to matalin with 'if there was truth serum in that cup'

maybe he is there 4 zings

this "retroactive retirement" thing is hilarious

I can't watch Brazile. You don't have to know she worked for Gore in 2000 to smell loserdom.

at least if romney wins we can trust him to spend any lame-duck period forgetting he's still president

I have an unusually high tolerance for these people. Even when James Carville starts speaking in tongues.

Why does he even want to be president?

team romney should really settle for him winding up bob dole and stop trying to establish a new low with this "i am not a crook" talk

if they keep this up i wonder if there's going to be another round of "SAVE US, CHRIS CHRISTIE!"

though in a most hilarious case scenario, where mitt bails or whatever before the convention, what could even happen? Would Paul get the nom or can some fantasy figure fly in?

Earth-2 Romney

This would all be very horrible for Romney, except it is mid-July and few people are paying attention apart from the political junkies. Now that O's campaign has launched this line of attack it will play out and die before Labor Day, when the real campaign resumes. New trivialities will arise and stalk the land, obliterating the memory of this one.

Bill Kristol, meanwhile, is saying that Romney has to get in front of this by a) releasing all his returns, then b) giving a big speech like Obama's Wright speech, but this time about the honor and poetry of amassing personal fortune through investment capital. I know what he's getting at, but that might be the high-wire act of all time.

yeah i'm sorry but when Romney is being told to a) tell all his long-held secrets and b) magically become a great public speaker I think the more likely outcome is for him to eat shit and fail.

"My own grandmother once said something snotty about billionaires and I've carried that pain in my heart for decades"

Matalin is so tragic in that - she has nothing but very weak talking points to go on

i realize it's tempting to say "all this will blow over, it is but july" but Romney was planning to run on being a great businessman and now he's saying he was a businessman only in name. While this is a whimper of a controversy it's also a dismantling of his whole gameplan.

he needs to switch from being a rich dude who is always defending his wealth into a get-rich-quick scam artist type

'how to start your own private equity business in five easy steps'

really want Romney to take a heel turn and go full-on birther

it could happen if he gets desperate, let's all think positive thoughts for this

"The profound mistake of Bain's outsourcing was not that it spoke about the need to cut operating expenses in our society. It's that it spoke as if operating expenses were static; as if no capital gains had been made..."

(Tempted to follow President Keyes' lead and re-write the whole speech.)

It's possible that Obama/America will step in it something fierce before the election, but I think that's what it will take for the GOP to be able to really go on the offensive (not that some papers aren't trying to spin "gosh, mr. president, you're so mean!" into an offensive tactic).

rahm emanuel had a lovely morning

"As Mitt Romney said once to his own Republican colleagues, stop whining," Emanuel said on ABC's "This Week." "I give him his own advice. Stop whining. If you want to claim Bain Capital as your calling card for the White House, then defend what happened at Bain Capital."

"Give it up about Stephanie Cutter," he said. "Don't worry about that. What are you going to do when the Chinese leader says something or Putin says something. You're going to whine? ... You cannot do that."

"As president of the United States, you can't have a sign on your desk that says 'Gone fishing.' You can't put that on that desk. It's basically, the buck stops there. You can't say to the SEC, 'I was the CEO and chairman and president, but I'm not responsible, I'm not accountable.'"