Ann Romney’s desperate family drama

(Note: This blog believes the candidates' wives should not be “off limits.” Unlike policy positions, Mitt Romney doesn’t switch wives. What his wife thinks and chooses to say are helpful in figuring out who he really is. Certainly, she is as revealing as the politician he eventually picks as his running mate.)

Three times over the last week—to Republican audiences and, once, on national television—Ann Romney has repeated the following story about their big decision.

“I said I only want to know one thing and that is, Mitt, if you get the nomination … can you fix it? I need to know, is it too late?”

“Has America gone over the proverbial cliff and we don’t have time to turn things around. I need to know whether it’s worth all this … He said no, it’s getting late, but it’s not too late. And with that I said, that’s all I need to know … if you can fix it, you must do this.”

Click on: www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75517_Page3.html#ixzz1sxpO0Ji4

Ann Romney could have been confused about the “proverbial cliff” the first time she told the story. After all, she’s only her husband’s principal advisor on labor markets.

Mitt could have been talking about Greece. Alternatively, the whole conversation could have taken place four years earlier—before the financial crash of 2008 rather than during the slow recovery on Obama’s watch. Yet her speech text remained unaltered through the week.

Still, even after correcting the dates, doesn’t the entire conversation seem false and just too precious? Like a bible story pasted up on green felt?  

You could imagine Bill Clinton, Mitt Romney, or, say, Abe Lincoln choosing to reply: “Yes, it may be too late for America, but I can’t hang around here for the rest of my life.”

But could you imagine Michelle asking Barack Obama—in the midst of the Iraq War and during the financial collapse of 2008—whether the US presidency was worth all the bother?

Finally, doesn’t the image of that ghastly cliff clash slightly with the promise of an across-the-board 20 per cent income tax cut?

The story could work, however, as a joke. When two Republican empty-nesters have a family talk about whether it’s too late for the husband to fix it, it’s rarely about a debilitating Democratic in the White House.

Romney has taken on new writers; he'd better be careful.

Ann Romney’s fire free zone

The Democratic Party has the courage to stand up to the Catholic hierarchy, nominate a black person for president, oppose the Iraq War, and introduce universal healthcare. Is it too soon for that liberal feminist party to stand up to the wife of their Republican opponent—is too much at stake?

Ann Romney is not another silent housewife married to 40 years of political ambition—a Pat Nixon without a martini—she’s an aggressive campaigner. Not only can she praise her husband, she can pander to audiences and sharply attack the Obama administration. She literally claims that she’s so afraid of where Obama is taking the country that she decided to tell Mitt that he simply had to run for president again.

Inevitably and disastrously, one Democrat spokesman, Hilary Rosen, had had enough and on CNN wondered why Ann Romney is qualified to speak on women’s economic issues “not having worked a day in her life.”

Click on: www.politico.com/arena/

Unanimously, Obama’s campaign sophisticates repudiated Rosen. Ann Romney will remain free to carry on saying whatever she likes.

After all: “I made my choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me it was hard work.”

Sorry. Physically exhausting work—for Mitt’s growing boys or for a food processor in Georgia—doesn’t give anyone special insight into how to govern America or any true understanding of how other Americans live. Further, it shouldn’t give anyone protection in political debate.

Not making snide remarks about staying home and waiting for Mitt and five boys is not the same as conceding to Ann Romney that she has any practical experience of what working women face as employees, as taxpayers, and as applicants for welfare, food support, unemployment assistance, child care openings, and training grants.

Ann and Mitt Romney are both political animals. One pretends to be merely on leave from business and the other on leave from housekeeping. They are convenient scams. It would be negligent if the press and punditry allow them to stand.

Mitt Romney can’t go home again

Mitt Romney may never allow his handlers to set his hair on fire to win the Republican nomination. Every man has his limits. But don’t expect an elegant pivot back to the center after last night’s primary results in Ohio and in Tennessee.

At all the known tasks—raising money, raising children, making serious money personally, being a faithful and god-fearing husband—he has outperformed his Republican opponents. Yet, they’re beating him decisively amongst social conservatives and working class voters.  

These voters can be reached. However, Romney’s economic focus won’t do it. He’s already proven that he’s willing to say some pretty amazing things. No matter how extreme his tax cuts get, however, economics won’t win their hearts or save him from Obama this fall.

One of the difficulties in talking non-stop about economics and taxes is that they make you think about money. And right-thinking and affluent people don’t like dwelling on the subject in public, especially Republicans.

Only the wife of a man worth over $250million, Ann Romney, could explain to CNN that she “doesn’t feel wealthy.”

If Wall Street was crashing for the first time in memory, rather than growing again, Romney could be sold as a crisis manager against a neophyte social worker from Chicago. Today, however, trying to beat Obama with labor market statistics and alternative growth scenarios would be impossibly boring.

Romney, as Bill Clinton’s strategist James Carville coined in 1992, wants to believe that it’s “the economy, stupid.” Actually, the term “cultural wars” is extreme but politically more realistic. People are truly divided about how they should be treated by the state, how they should be treated in the economy, and by one another.

The good politicians try to bridge these differences and heal injustices. Bad politicians look for scapegoats and foreign enemies. There’s a lot for a good Romney to be excited about and for his conscience to play with.

Rush Limbaugh’s obscenities unite Ann and Mitt Romney

On tricky (potentially revealing) issues, some wives will say almost anything to help out. Mitt Romney knows that Ann Romney is that kind of wife.

What does he do when the loudest conservative in the country calls a young law student a “slut” and “prostitute” for disagreeing with him on access to contraceptives? Romney has said the issue is of grave national importance, the student spoke back gravely, and he’s been a blue blazer gentleman since his nineteenth birthday.

The frontrunner huddles with his wife of 42 years and they dance. Here’s a glimpse at a Romney White House under pressure:

“When finally pressed for an opinion on Friday night, CNN quotes him as saying, "I'll just say this which is it's not the language I would have used," Romney said. "I'm focusing on the issues I think are significant in the country today, and that's why I'm here talking about jobs and Ohio."

“Romney's wife spoke out as well, and in the same vein: 'I love it that women are concerned and voting for economic reasons,' she told a handful of supporters at her husband's Ohio campaign headquarters in Columbus. 'Moms are very angry about the deficit spending in Washington, D.C.'"

Click on: http://politics.gather.com/viewArticle.action?articleId=281474981162013

Ann Romney, America’s best known bi-coastal homemaker, went on to enthuse that “Women ... for the first time, may be voting their pocket books, which is great.”

Their evasive duet deserves wide and unreserved scorn.

It expresses the frayed hope that women voters generally will look the other way in November on contraceptives, Supreme Court appointments, and health issues on which Republicans would roll back American social policy. They will also forget that their nominee couldn’t stand up to a vicious bully, that civility might be just too European for modern Republican politics. Heck, modern women like a good joke too and Limbaugh is just too funny to be scolded.  

Does Anne Romney imagine that her husband can be a good old boy on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays—and a cosmopolitan on Tuesdays and Thursdays?

Does Ann Romney think that other women in America will let her husband lie to them because he doesn’t lie to her?

Furthermore, where did she pick up this princess notion that American women might, for the first time, put their pocketbooks—or allowance, in her case—front and center in a national election? As if the ditsy girly-vote and girly legislators launched the $trillion dollar wars of the last two generations, the free prescription drug plans, the universal tax cuts, the earmarks, and Star wars. And now—“I love it”—are growing up.

Historically, women have never been less concerned about the future, the sustainability of their families, their communities, and their country’s finances than men. And today are no easier to distract—when threatened individually or as a gender—by the Limbaugh’s, Catholic bishops, or their apologists.