Mitt Romney has five obvious things on his resume that might count in his favor as someone who could be a good president. Let’s look at them.
1. He received an excellent education, going to a top prep school, graduating at the top of his class at BYU, and getting dual graduate degrees in business and law from Harvard. However, he decided to attack his opponent for his Ivy League connections and thereby lost the ability to tout his own educational credentials.
2. He became a multimillionaire by running a private equity firm. But he just spent two weeks trying to convince us that he left that firm four years earlier than he actually did because he doesn’t want to be associated with the firm’s activities.
3. He ran the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. But after his trip to the London Olympics, the last thing Mitt will want is for anyone to mention the words “Romney” and “Olympics” in the same paragraph.
4. He was the governor of Massachusetts. But he renounced his biggest accomplishment as governor, and he didn’t bother to run for a second term because he would have been soundly defeated.
5. He’s an upright and moral family man. But he won’t let us see his taxes or examine his secret foreign bank accounts, and he just threw his wife and her dressage horse under the bus on international television in return for what he perceived to be some kind of short-term political gain.
So, I ask you ladies and gentlemen, what is left?
That’s he an Anglo-Saxon? Those people hate his guts.
Is it a bad time to point out that “Anglo-Saxon” is in fact a mongrel such as I, a mixed breed”?
he’s still the right height …
What’s left?
Romney says, Bush’s foreign policy that was prematurely abandoned. Elect Mitt and retroactively erase the Arab Spring.
He’s flailing now. Hugging Bush puts him into less than zero territory.
So he’s going to the Middle East, as the Syrian regime is in the midst of massacring Arab Spring protesters-cum-rebels, talking about how he hates Arab Spring, too.
Well that’s just peachy.
He looks like the kind of guy that would be cast as president in a Hollywood film, but only until he opens his mouth. To his supporters, his greatest qualifications are his skin color and party affiliation. That alone will get him about 45% of the vote — which scares me. What’s up with this country? Could we be any more stupid?
I heard on Bloomberg that 50% of the electorate does not believe that Obama is a Christian and 17% believe he is a Muslim. So, yeah, we could be more stupid.
P.S. Maybe 33% (50 -17) think he is a Jew or a Mormon?
Or an atheist. Or they think he isn’t a True Christian, because if he were a True Christian he’d be anti-choice and hate gay people.
it’s even worse among the ratpublicans:
as paul whitefield opines in the LAT, Think Obama’s a Muslim? Then you’re too stupid to vote
l’ll second that.
Yeah, I’ll go with that all right.
and this was the best candidate the Repubs could find.
Given that the Republican Party is ruled by the Tea Party, their base, and that their base can’t elect a president all of themselves, Romney was the best the establishment could do WITH MONEY.
The economy sucks, Obama hasn’t fixed it, and Romney might.
An obviously simplified and dishonest line of attack sure, but Romney has embraced dishonesty and it’s working as best anything could.
Well, honesty got his Daddy in trouble. Just think we might have had a Romney v. Humphrey 1968 election had not George made the gaffe of telling the truth in too direct a way.
I can’t figure out one thing – wasn’t George born in Mexico? How could he have run?
He was born in Mexico of two US citizen parents and returned by the age prescribed by law,
I think wrinkle is that the 14th Amendment says all people born here are citizens but that is inclusive not exclusive.
I believe courts have interpreted “natural born” to mean “born a citizen, never a citizen elsewhere.
Don’t think this question has ever been presented to a court. Been relying on opinions issued by election commissions and legal scholars and for both George Romney and John McCain there was agreement that they were born US citizens. Not sure the fact their families returned to the US when they were still children has any legal weight on the question. If the “birthers” weren’t such ignoramuses they would have recognized that Obama would have met the same test even if he had been born in Kenya.
on the question whether dual citizenship cancels out “natural-born” citizenship, i haven’t heard of any court rulings on that.
since countries are free to amend their citizenship rules anytime, country X could arbitrarily award citizenship to americans and nullify their natural-born status if such status depended on not having dual citizenship. that kind of dependency would be obviously untenable.
regarding “natural-born” citizenship itself, courts have thus far consistently ruled that:
reiterated in voeltz v obama et al, 2012:
But McCain was born in Panama.
Regarding the dual citizenship, I misspoke. It should be “born a citizen, not born something else then naturalized.”
Apparently, these weighty matters have been decided by legal scholars rather than courts. Regarding the return to US thing, my memory is a little hazy on that, but in High School American History class, I seem to remember we were told there was such a requirement at one time. Immigration laws have changed a lot over the years. When I was in High School, we still had national quotas based on the current ethnic composition. That resulted in huge unfilled quotas for England and nearly nothing for China or Korea. I don’t thoink there was much for Africa either, although there should have been 20% of the green cards by the law’s logic.
However, when I was in High School, half of history didn’t exist.
The trouble with George, as I’ve heard it explained, is not that he was born in Mexico, it’s that prior to his birth his parents both renounced their US citizenship in order to gain Mexican citizenship.
Cases of children of US citizens born abroad have not made it to the Supreme Court, as far as I can tell, and I have researched it a bit, seeing as my son was born abroad but is a full US citizen and has had all his paperwork since he was 2 months old. The only other Constitutional requirement that I can find is that he reside in the US for a minimum of 14 years, and for all I can tell, he can be POTUS one day if that’s where his path leads him.
The trick is, the Constitution doesn’t lay out a clear definition of “natural born citizen” in its language, but over the years, in various lower court cases and in acts like the Naturalization Act of 1790, a sort of consensus emerges as to who is considered a native citizen and who isn’t.
To borrow a quote from the ever-popular and never-wrong Wikipedia, a 2011 Congressional Research Service found that:
IOW, a US citizen who did not gain that status through naturalization is, barring a SCOTUS decision to the contrary, a “natural born citizen.” In all likelihood.
But what if George Romney’s parents renounced their citizenship, and subsequently he was born outside of US jurisdiction? That’s a different kettle of fish.
I know this, my son and my stepdaughter both have full US citizenship as far as I can tell, birth certs, SocSec #s, US Passports that look just like mine, with no periodic hassles from naturalization services and the like.
That’s why the whole Birther thing has driven me nuts from the outset: unless the Birthers are arguing that PBHO is actually born of two non-US citizens (and if you’ve seen the photo of him and his granddad on the beach, you know how obvious that blood relation is), then even if he was born in Kenya, they’ve got nothing. Nobody disputes that he put in his 14 years of residency in the US. What else is there? Or rather, what else would there be if people actually had brains and stuff.
George’s POTUS quest didn’t even make it to the NH primary, but his quick exit was more complicated than a gaffe and being too honest. The GOP crazies were muzzled in 1968 but only if the party didn’t nominate anyone to the left of Nixon.
I think you’re assuming an awful lot based on a wobble. It’s just the latest in a series of them, that you can see right in your graph.
A wobble in a Rasmussen daily tracker, of all things.
It’s without Rasmussen.
riddle me this…
Willard hasn’t closed the gap with women…
and, he’s lost five points with Latinos…
so, where the hell is he closing in on the President?
White voters in states Romney was going to win anyway.
They don’t like Romney, but they’re coming home to the Republican Party.
Throw up this link for number 3:
Mitt Romney’s Pork Barrel Olympics
The truly amazing thing about these five items is that in every single case, the loss of his ability to cite them has been self-inflicted.
But, but, but, it’s MITT’s TURRRRN! He’s waited SOOO long for his overdue coronation! Why do we even need campaigns and elections? It’s just not faaaaiiir! Wah!
Watch This Space
Watch This Space
The hair! The hair!
And to think they could have had really Goodhair! More affable and apparently no more gaffe prone than the Mittster.
Who woulda thunk it? A tribute to the NHS at the olympics
“He’s an upright family man” who put his dog on the roof of the car.
Okay, this is a totally unfair cheap shot, but I LOLed.
the atrociousness of romney’s campaign is quite astounding, even compared to mccain’s.
despite generous help from partisan msm on one side (FOX) and a supine “he-said-she-said”, “never-say-lie” msm on the other side, unscrupulous liar mitt still can’t seal the deal even with a desperate conservative base.
would romney or anyone else this lame have ever gotten close to the nomination before the age of fox news?
or without SUPERPAC money?
where would Willard be without SUPERPAC money?
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In the Republican debates, Romney would sit down with his attorneysbefore taking action against Iran. I read today Romney would call his friend Bibi Natanyahu and ask him what he likes him to do. Netanyahu denies being a friend of Romney, must be similar in denying his cordial friendship with Adelson. Of course, Sharon denied his warm relations with GWB and leading the leader into a war and occupation of Iraq in accordance with the Jenin principles of the IDF. Will Mitt and Bibi sign a declaration of understanding on Iran policy and nuclear deterrence? Perhaps too risky, Mitt can’t keep his mouth shut (MI6 visit).
Waiting for Mitt’s arrival at Israel’s wailing wall: Romney, Tisha B’Av, and LDS Temples .
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."
That’s the real trouble with Romney. If he actually attained the office, he’d be a complete reed in the wind to whatever constituency scared him the most.
We can’t speculate on his actions as President based on his prior performance as Governor, because back in those days the stakes were lower and The Crazy was just a distant speck on the horizon.
If he actually becomes President some day, he’ll be Grover Norquist’s document signer, and god knows what else he gets bullied into being.
Honestly, I don’t even know why he wants the job at all. What’s in it for Romney to be President in the first place? Fame? Fortune? He’s got money–not Sheldon Adelson money, but surely he could attain that if that’s what he was after.
I don’t want to troll the Kolob angle, but what if he just wanted to be the first Mormon President? As a means of proving that members of his faith are worthy of the very highest office in the land?
Grasping at straws here, I realize that, but there’s a serious disconnect. Mitt Romney has no clear reason to be running for President at all. His family and fortune are secure, he has name recognition, but most of all he has absolutely no aptitude either for the job itself or even to be a viable candidate for it. His policy positions are obviously dictated to him, and in many cases it’s quite clear that he doesn’t even grasp the issues under discussion.
Maybe he doesn’t really want to be President at all.
But he still has this.
wayback
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"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."