I don’t know what would possess someone to go out and spend 16 hours knocking on doors in Connecticut for senate candidate Linda McMahon. Anyone who could read a poll knew that she was going to lose. But, since she was offering to pay people for their time, I guess work is work, right? The problem is that all those workers had their last checks bounce. Then some of them went to a local television station and complained, which led to a story that was broadcast in the Nutmeg State. This irritated the McMahon campaign. Check out what happened next:
Twaine Don Gomes was one of the people who first complained to News 8. He was handed a check, but he says the campaign told him they were mad that he came to News 8, so he got a little something extra in his envelope.
“Basically he handed me a check with a condom in it, told me I was screwed,” Gomes said. “That’s the rudest gesture you can ever do to a person, it’s like spitting in a person’s face.”
His check bounced as well. The workers say, this was the last thing they were expecting after spending hours in the cold, working hard for their candidate on election day.
“I’m not blaming Mrs. McMahon for this, I’m not bashing anyone,” Brown said, “but I just want my pay for 16 hours.”
Now, hopefully you remember that Mitt Romney made sure to cancel all his campaign’s credit cards as soon as the polls closed on Election Day. The result was that his top staffers had their cards declined by restaurants and cabs. They worked their butts off for months and all day long on Election Day, and they couldn’t even get dinner or a ride home.
Think about the contempt and lack of gratitude involved in a gesture like that. Romney did that to some of his most loyal and dedicated lieutenants. Linda McMahon was even worse. She refused to pay people for work they had done and then had her staff issue more bogus checks, including the one with a condom inside.
Compare this to the organizing team that Obama built. His volunteers didn’t ask for pay. His paid staff didn’t get stiffed. And he told his team just how much he thought of them, including the sentiment that his volunteer army might be his biggest gift to the nation.
Surely, some of Obama’s volunteers will grow disillusioned with his presidency, but they will never disavow or regret their experiences as organizers because they had camaraderie and purpose and they were treated with respect and empowered. The people who worked for Romney and McMahon will only be bitter. They were used. They were used, and they now know this without the slightest ambiguity.
This only makes Dan Senor’s lament all the more rich with irony.
Dan Senor, a top adviser to former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, on Wednesday accused Republicans within the former presidential candidate’s inner circle of being fair weather fans, all too eager to throw Romney under the bus only days after his defeat.
Speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” Senor called the trend “stunning,” before taking aim at unnamed Republican officials who he said sought to cozy up to Romney when they believed he was on his way to a victory over President Barack Obama.
Senor described a particular campaign rally in Cincinnati in the days before the election.
“Tens of thousands of people, you could feel the energy, a hundred top-tier Romney surrogates were at the event,” he recalled. “I’m backstage with some of them — I won’t mention their names — but they’re talking about Romney like he’s Reagan. ‘His debate performances were the best performances of any Republican nominee in presidential history. He’s iconic.’ They were talking about him because they believed he was going to win in four or five days. And in fact, some of them were already talking to our transition to position themselves for a Romney cabinet.”
But that all changed within days of Romney’s loss, Senor claimed.
“They were on television, it was unbelievable, it was five, six days later, absolutely eviscerating [Romney],” he said.
Imagine that. Everyone is insincere. Everyone is using each other. People who get dissed are all too willing to diss in return.
I said it before the election. If Romney had been elected, he would have been the most unpopular and unpleasant president in history. No one who knew him liked him. And he didn’t like any of us, either. He was the unpleasant leader of an unpleasant party and ideology. Everyone in that movement is in it for themselves, and the second you stop being useful, they will discard you. And then they’ll say that you’re just a victim.
We almost were.