Poor Mitt Romney. He's taking heat from all sides. All sides, that is, in his own party! It seems like every day, Mittens is writing attack ads for the opposition. Now, even some of his friends are starting to notice. It all started with none other than Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who, not long after he survived a bruising recall battle, went public with the notion that Romney can't beat President Barack Obama by going negative alone. He had to have his own vision, opined Walker.
When a leading conservative union buster says you've got no game, you've got a problem. Yet this was only the beginning. Not long after the president announced his order allowing the children of undocumented immigrants to stay in the country for two years, Romney embarrassed himself by not answering Bob Schieffer's questions on Face the Nation. Schieffer asked if if he . Romney, would repeal the president's order. Instead of answering directly, Mittens headed for the border, and when that didn't work, pilloried Obama. Few who saw it could argue it was in the same ballpark with the term direct answer.
And we haven't even touched Romney's attempt to weasel out of charges his old firm Bain Capital wrote the book on outsourcing. His spokesman tried to parse outsourcing and offshoring, as if the average person cares. The real gyrations started when the Supreme Court ruled on the Affordable Care Act last week. Romney, of course, couldn't be seen as favoring an act that was strikingly similar to the one he signed into law as Massachusetts Governor (don't worry, he parses that too). Yet in a rare moment of independent thought, he broke with his Republican homies and had a spokesman say the individual mandate component of the Act wasn't a tax but a penalty.
The conservative wing of the party broke out in hives. After all, this was their primary line of attack. "The biggest tax increase in US history!", or so the reasoning went. And here's Mittens, straying off message. But not for long! 24 hours later, he was back, and back on message. "It's a tax", he thundered. The nation, caught up in the Fourth of July, yawned. By now, however, some of Romney's presumed allies were starting to notice his complete lack of political skill. No less a personage than Rupert Murdoch dogged him out on Twitter. If Romney didn't get that memo, Murdoch's Wall. St. Journal followed up with a scathing assessment of Romney and his "Boston Boys".
Even though I started out this post with Poor Mitt Romney, I was only fooling. Just goes to show money can't buy competence or vision.
Or can it? You tell me.
