Do you know who Stuart Stevens is? Do you know his face? Have you seen him quoted or watched him on teevee? Apparently, the guy is the equivalent to Barack Obama’s David Axelrod. And, apparently, he’s going to take the fall for Mitt Romney’s horrible no-good lame adventure of a campaign. He’s not a real conservative. He’s too Hollywood. He went to college in liberal enclaves. He’s too cautious. He’s an eclectic flake.
I’ll tell you what the guy is. He’s practically invisible. But he also sucks at his job. Why the Romney campaign thinks it is good idea to air all their internal dirty laundry less than 60 days from the election is a mystery to me.
I thought the McCain campaign was incompetent, but they had nothing on this ship of fools.
That’s my question–Why on earth are they publicizing “campaign in disarray” stories at this time?
Somebody wants him off the campaign?
Maybe it’s just rats fleeing a sinking ship. They know Willard is toast.
I find it hilarious that the story itself points out the SAME DAMN THING!
They’re probably seeing a decline in fundraising, so they want donors to know things will be better when they fire Stevens. The Romney campaign’s plan involves using a massive money advantage to swamp swing states with attack ads, which is kinda hard to do if they don’t actually have a massive money advantage.
“We apologise for the poor quality of the subtitles in the credits. Those responsible have been sacked.” (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
When that doesn’t work, it will be: “Those responsible for sacking those who were sacked, have been sacked.”
yusuf islam’scat stevens’ illegitimate younger brother?As bad as Stevens may be, he’s not culpable for Romney’s own foot-in-mouth issues, nor his often inability to be self-consistent in a single statement.
And this could be one of those situations where Stevens could deserve credit for getting Romney where is he is today–making a hard tilt to the right in the primaries to become the GOP nominee. I wonder what Romney would have looked like in the primaries without Stevens.
I thought Eric Fehrnstrom was running Willard’s campaign? Or did he leave to try and salvage Scott Brown’s doomed campaign?
It is hard to believe a duel MBA/JD from America’s finest university could run such a bad campaign, so I look elsewhere for what is happening and what I see could be referred to as the Big Grift, ie., the entire Romney 2012 presidential campaign.
Since it was well known that close to a billion dollars would be thrown towards any GOP candidate that won the nomination, I think it is well within reason that political operatives would use a candidate simply to collect donations (from which these folks would get their percentages). It would not matter a bit whether the candidate won, but whether these people got rich from skimming off the top of hundreds of millions of dollars.
If the Koch brothers and that Adelson gnome knocked on your door and told you that they were each willing to spend a half a billion dollars to beat Barack Obama, even I would run against him just to get some of that money. So, what I see is that the Romney campaign never expected to win and is using the campaign as a grift to collect money.
Max Bialystock would be proud.
I’m curious to know why you think “it is hard to believe” that a Harvard grad could run a bad political campaign.
Pick a year at random and you’ll find Harvard grads screwing things up. For example:
2002: Harvard grads Pres. George W. Bush and Cardinal Bernard Law dominate the headlines by wreaking havoc on the institutions they lead, and on countless lives beyond.
Come on guy, don’t put words in my mouth. I did not refer to the man simply as a Harvard grad, but a guy who was smart enough to earn an MBA and law degree from Harvard simultaneously. It was hard enough for me to get my Ph.D. in chemistry, so I don’t think that I could have done what Romney accomplished. Although there are a lot of dumb smart guys, Romney is not one of them.
You do appreciate that the rules — even at elite educational institutions or perhaps even more so at elite universities — are different for the elite than those from the lower classes don’t you?
More on the same idea…a comment I made on Booman’s The Seinfeld Candidacy piece.
Dear Stuart: You’re doing a sucky job. Keep it up!
Love, the Democrats
In the midst of all the fail, the only positive Romney character trait comes out- he is loyal to staffers. So, actually, he doesn’t like firing people. At least people he actually knows.
Very very typical for the CEO class. They think nothing of laying off thousands of people and slashing benefits for the rest, but they’ll stick with the VPs who created the problem for long, long, long after their incompetence is obvious to everyone else – and then give the failed VP a big bonus when they are finally forced to push them out the door.
You mean like his debate coach who received the credit for his one positive debate performance? Or maybe his gay foreign policy adviser? And I am sure there are others we may not know about. His is loyal to his staff, as long as any specific staff member neither outshines him or might possibly make him look bad with the base.
Eewww – it’s almost like reading the Nixon White House tape transcripts. This party never changes, it regenerates like a malignant bacteria.
Yes, we do know these people.
well Redstate concurs
http://www.redstate.com/2012/09/17/if-the-election-were-held-today-barack-obama-would-win/
I haven’t perused comments over there in quite some time. I had forgotten what an alternate universe it is on that side of the fence.
This is the same story that has been written about every losing campaign in the history of campaigns.
It’s also completely meaningless because it presumes a potential universe where Romney could have won. He cannot. No one running that campaign could turn the sewage that is the Republican party platform into champagne. You can’t run on the Republican party platform and be truly competitive on the national stage.
Even worse if you’re Mitt Romney and you lie with every breath, and can only be assumed to actually believe maybe half of said platform. And that’s the half that believes that rich people should pay no taxes, that Obama is destroying America with his socialist weakness, and that gays are totally gross and stuff and should get back in the closet.
Everybody (even his ambivalent base) can only conclude that the guy is a Pleasantville android that wants to steal their jobs and plunder the economy. Does that sound like a winning candidate to anybody?
This is the same story that has been written about every losing campaign in the history of campaigns.
Yeah, the story isn’t unusual, it’s just the timing that’s unusual. Normally campaigns don’t let the finger-pointing get started until after the election. Witness the tidal wave of embargoed stories trashing Sarah Palin that popped up as soon as the votes were counted in 2008. Romney’s crew getting a six-week head start on laying blame says they’re either desperate, despondent, or both.