The Magical Mittstory Tour
... is coming to take you away—if you live in what the Romney camp considers winnable swing states that just need a little dab of the Mittens charm to clinch the deal, according to an LA Times report a couple of days ago:
The GOP presumptive nominee will kick off a five day, six-state bus tour Friday at the place it all began — the Scamman Farm in Stratham, N.H., a 300-acre tomato, herb and seedling operation where he announced his presidential bid last June.
From there, he will head to Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan — battleground states in his fall race against President Obama that played major roles in the primary contest between Romney and Rick Santorum.
This all sounds a little too close for comfort to the charabanc antics last year of another hasbeen politician with pretensions to power, but will it offer similar scope for hilarity? Elspeth Reeve at Atlanticwire answers the question you’re all no doubt asking:
Why did Romney pick these swing states instead of the southern or western ones? For starters, the “Every Town” states are the ones where Bain Capital is the least popular. A Purple Strategies poll released last week found that New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin are the most likely to think private equity hurts the country instead of helping the economy. Republicans have urged Romney to own his success. But he needs to explain it just right. A Pew poll released this month found that while 88 percent of people completely or mostly agree with the statement “I admire people who get rich by working hard,” only 27 percent completely or mostly agree with the statement “I admire people who are rich.” Maybe this tour is his chance to show his hard-working side.
If you’re desperate to catch a glimpse or touch the hem of Mittens’ garment, I’m afraid that his campaign’s increasingly florid paranoia means that the precise tour itinerary is a bit sketchy. The LA Times adds:
The campaign has released few details about the “Every Town Counts” tour, saying that Romney will meet with families and business owners in small towns. He will take part in a Father’s Day pancake breakfast on Sunday in Brunswick, Ohio, and rally supporters on Monday at a park in Davenport, Iowa.
So Sunday looks a cert to be a bit of a hoot, but what could possibly go wrong on the other four days? Oh. Dateline Iowa, a few days ago:
Dianne Bauer opened up her cafe to Mitt Romney and his campaign for a small round table discussion Friday morning before his speech at Bayliss Park.
This isn’t the first politician that has asked Bauer to use the Main Street Cafe in downtown Council Bluffs.
“With Rick Perry he made a point of stopping in the kitchen before he ever went to the other side to address the public and the media to thank us and introduce himself to us,” said Bauer. “That’s what I thought we would get here, just normal. This was all out, like you’d think Obama was here.”
Bauer’s issues with the campaigns staffers started the night before when they started staging the cafe for the event.
She described many of their demeanors as “arrogant”.
She says her cafe was not treated with the respect it deserved.
“Stuff got broke. My table cloths they just got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room,”
She says the boom truck she allowed the campaign to borrow to gain access to the roof now has an 8-inch gouge in it that she’ll have to take the time to repair.
The campaign told her to send them an itemized list of anything that was broken, and they would pay for it, but Bauer says that won’t fix everything.
“My dad’s picture, an emblem my dad gave me, it got broke. Those aren’t things you can replace,”
Bauer says she never even got to meet the candidate she closed half of her restaurant down for.
So far, so good.
She was complaining about the event to a friend when reporters overheard her and posted about it online.
That’s when Romney called Bauer himself. She says he explained that it was just a misunderstanding that she did not get to meet him, but the phone call didn’t smooth things over for her.
“He responded ‘well, I’m sorry your table cloths got ripped off, wadded up and thrown in the back room’ and I took it as mocking,” she said. “We’re the ones he’s wanting to get the votes from, you’d think we would have been treated better.”
She says the whole experience left her wondering.
“With how he treated me, is that how he’s going to treat others? You know, if he gets in office is he going to be that way to us little people?”
Along with the candidate’s lack of familiarity with exotic foodstuffs and his sniffy rejection of any that were not handrolled to order on matrons’ own thighs, such balls-ups are grist to mill for we who sit and mock, of course. But something strikes me.
Only a few weeks ago, Mittens’ campaign was yapping on about “Obama isn’t working.” President Obama currently has the small matter of a country to run as well as a whole scad of campaigning to do, and inevitably sometimes one or the other falls on its arse, to the glee of the Mittens camp and its followers.
Mitt, on the other hand, has done nothing notable except campaign for the presidency for most of the last twenty years, and he and his minions have nothing else to do with their time except campaign. And still they screw it up with predictable regularity. Whatever sort of organization he’s heading, it doesn’t appear to be a learning one.
Unless they come up with an OS upgrade to give Mitt and the Mittbots multitasking capabilities, I fear he may not be up to the job he so avidly craves.
More: John Avlon at The Daily Beast takes a look at a few places that aren’t on the tour route:
Despite headquartering his campaign in Boston, the former governor of Massachusetts isn’t going to win his home state this fall. More significantly, he isn’t going to try.
Ditto California, the state where he owns a beachfront La Jolla home complete with a $55,000 car elevator. And likely Michigan, the state of his birth, where his father served two terms as governor.
Posted by YAFB on 06/14/12 at 07:46 AM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Election '12 • Mittens • Polisnark • Skull Hampers •
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