Tag Archives: michael tomasky

What if there’s a blowout on Election Day?

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Although he still thinks the election will be close, and even that Romney could pull out a win, Michael Tomasky has some fun imagining what would happen IF the President wins in a landslide. Would anything actually change if Obama blew Romney out of the water on Election Day? YES:

  • First, a marvelously amusing recriminations war among Republicans and conservatives about what happened, and it will result in the conservative movement marginalizing itself from mainstream America even further. It will start with arguments over political strategy…
  • [The] Republicans in Congress would almost surely have to become less obstinate. Yes, there will be intense pressure from the Tea Party wing to draw an even firmer line against Obama. But I suspect there will be more pressure in the other direction, especially on senators, who represent whole states…
  • [In] one recent Washington Post story that some Hill Republicans are preparing themselves now for coming to terms with the idea of giving in to Obama on upper-income tax increases. A huge victory will ratchet up such pressure. So let’s say that’s impact number three: Obama gets his grand bargain before Jan. 1. He gets his tax increase, meaning that some Republicans vote to raise a tax for the first time in 20 years. What he gives in return for that is a serious question…
  • And fourth and finally, if all this happens, the political balance of the country changes. We’ll still be bitterly divided, because the people responsible for sowing most of the division will never shut up. But it won’t be a 50-50 country anymore. It’ll be a 54-46 country. That’s a country with a clear majority. Built by Obama…

Read it all…

In other words, there could be lot less of this malarkey:

image: truth-has-a-liberal-bias

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Mitt Romney: true wimp or insecure weenie?

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This is a good piece in Newsweek by Michael Tomasky: Mitt Romney: A Candidate With a Serious Wimp Problem:

“…But the new values surface often enough—his fondness for firing people, the way he made fun of NASCAR fans’ ponchos, his reminders to us that his friends are the people who own the teams, and now his putdown of an entire nation, which happens to be our closest ally—to suggest that they won the argument.

“[...] In some respects, he’s more weenie than wimp—socially inept; at times awkwardy ingratiating, at other times mocking those “below” him, but almost always getting the situation a little wrong, and never in a sympathetic way. The evidence resonates across too many years to deny. What kind of teenager beats up on the misfit, sissy kid, pinning him down and violently cutting his hair with a pair of school scissors—the incident from Romney’s youth that The Washington Post famously reported (and Romney famously didn’t really deny) back in May? The behavior extends, through more sedate means, into adulthood. The Salt Lake Olympics remains his greatest triumph, for which he wins deserved praise. But to many of those in the know, Romney placed a heavy asterisk next to his name by attacking the men he replaced on the Olympic Committee, smearing them in his book, even after a court threw out all the corruption charges against them.

“And what kind of presidential candidate whines about a few attacks and demands an apology when the going starts to get rough? And tries to sound tough by accusing the president who killed the world’s most-wanted villain of appeasement? That’s what they call overcompensation, and it’s a dead giveaway; it’s the “tell.” This guy is nervous—terrified—about looking weak. And ironically, being terrified of looking weak makes him look weaker still.

“[...] In a similar vein, it was breathtaking, and a meaningful window into his thinking, that he thought denouncing “Obamacare” to the NAACP constituted courage. That was the opposite of courage—an easy shot aimed at people who aren’t voting for him anyway. Going to the Southern Baptist Convention and telling them they’re all wet about Mormonism? Now that would be courage. Can anyone picture Romney doing that in a million years? The Mormon God will come down from Kolob before that happens.”

Mitt Romney’s special gift: consistently repelling Americans

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Michael Tomasky discusses why people really, really don’t like Mitt Romney (emphasis below is mine):

Mitt, the Unlikable 

Romney, though? This is the biggest washout of modern times, folks. Gallup just this week put the likeability ratings at Obama 60, Romney 31. It’s not that Obama’s number is unusually high. Look back at those Kerry-Bush numbers. Americans are an open-hearted lot, at least presumptively, so they want to like the guy who’s going be the president. But they Do. Not. Like. Mitt. Romney.

It would be more interesting for all of us if there were some great mystery here, but there isn’t. He reeks of privilege. Every time he says something off the cuff he says something obnoxious. Corporations are people, pal. I like firing people. Where on earth did you get those Godforsaken cookies? (Note: I still can’t believe what he said about the frigging cookies!)

He also—and this actually is interesting, because it’s something our normal public discourse does not like to admit or allow for—is way too rich. We’re constantly told that Americans don’t have any class envy, and compared to some European nations they don’t. But even Americans have limits. A few million, even $50 million; okay. But a quarter billion dollars? A house with an elevator . . . for the cars? It also matters to people how the money was made. It’s okay to be worth a gajillion dollars if you’re Bill Gates or Steve Jobs and have made everyone’s lives more interesting and cooler. But what’s Mitt Romney done? Helped give us Domino’s Pizza.

Even so, Romney might still pass muster, but he has no grasp of the one crucial reality of class in America: you can be filthy rich as long as you don’t look or act like it. Gates doesn’t comb his hair, much. Jobs wore sneakers. Romney just looks too pressed. Even when he’s wearing those jeans. You can look at Romney on television and practically sense how he smells—of costly ablutions whose brand names the rest of us probably don’t even know. And he acts relentlessly rich.

And this brings us back to the Cranbrook School incident. We might have learned from The Washington Post this week that Romney gallantly interceded on poor Lauber’s behalf. Or even, maybe, that he did the awful deed, but a few years later he got in touch with Lauber to say, “Gee, old scout, went a bit overboard there.” Or even that he acknowledged to one of his confederates that he regretted the incident. In other words, we might have learned something that showed he knows he behaved like an asshole. But all we learned is that he behaved like an asshole and is now pretending to forget it. A jerk is one thing. But a jerk who takes no responsibility for his jerkitude is pretty much the definition of an unlikeable person.

Read all of it, it’s good. My one question to conservative voters would be: what’s there to like about Mitt? If your first response is that he’s not Obama and that’s enough, then what’s that say about you?


image: mittromneysamerica

There is no GOP ‘savior’

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“So there is no savior. And let us please be clear on why there is no savior. Because there is no one who could satisfy the base of the GOP = a cohort so drunk on ideology and resentment that they cheer electrocutions and boo a soldier – and be elected president of the United States. Period. The standard journalistic trope the past few months has been to say that the Republican establishment would step in at some point and not let things get too out of hand. But that’s mostly nonsense. This GOP establishment is barely less loopy than the base. If this base is driving the party into a ditch, the establishment is riding shotgun holding a shovel.” – Michael Tomasky - There Will Be No Saviors for the GOP in 2012 / The Daily Beast (via: randomactsofchaos)

 

“It was obvious… that Bush held back in Afghanistan so he’d have more fire power for Iraq.”

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“The mistake George W. Bush made was not in invading; any country would and should have retaliated for an act like the 9/11 attacks. The mistake was in doing it on the cheap, with only 12,000 troops to start. One still can’t say this in polite company in Washington without drawing a condescending stare from some oily sycophant of power, but it was obvious even in the fall of 2001 that Bush held back in Afghanistan so he’d have more fire power for Iraq.” — Michael Tomasky reviews the U.S.’s history in Afghanistan, ahead of Obama’s speech tonight addressing the drawdown.

Via cheatsheet