Romney Campaign Shows Business Isn’t Politics

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Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Audio and Transcript – Let me just point out the greatest irony of all ironies here…  The Romney résumé is that he is the manager dude.  He is the CEO.  He’s the turnaround man.  He runs those companies, turns the losers into winners, does all these things, right?  What is the campaign?  The campaign is a company.  It’s an endeavor.  How many millions have been raised?  He’s raised some ungodly amount of money, like $350, $400 million, something like that.  The campaign is a company.

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Folks, I really find this discussion contrived, shall we say.  I really find most of the debate and most of the campaigning going on just woefully insignificant and contrived.  [mocking media] “Did you hear what President Obama said?  Governor Romney, can we get a comment on what President Obama said?”  [mocking Romney] “He’s gonna be out.  He’ll be on the outside looking in.  We’re gonna show him the door in November.”  What does this have to do with the problems?  The problems are big.  They’re beyond big.  They defy description.  So we have a campaign that ultimately is like a Seinfeld show.  It’s a campaign about nothing because no one in the Romney campaign has waded in to define it.  This just seemed so easy back in March, didn’t it?  People were measuring Obama and his reelection for a coffin, weren’t they?  [mocking] “There’s no way in this economy he could ever get reelected.  There’s no way with approval ratings like that he could ever . . ..”  Oh, yeah?

The sadness of this is, and I must say that it is a sad event, is that tens of millions of people have put their hope and their faith in the defeat of Obama, the defeat of President Obama.  They laid that hope and faith at Mitt Romney’s feet.  Mitt Romney, it must be admitted, has done an awful lot of disappointing.  Perhaps it’s because of what was expected.  Was it expected that Mitt would not take the case directly to Obama?  Remember, this was the big knock on John McCain.  [mocking] “He won’t go after Obama and his socialism.”  Maybe that’s because Mitt, by and large, agrees with Obama, not the socialist part, he’d never admit that, but certainly the bailouts.  [mocking Romney] “I would have done the bailouts, too, but I would have made bankruptcy a requirement first.”  Oh, dude, don’t say that.  The bailouts were a big deal.  People still oppose the bailouts.  They still hate them.  You have both candidates for the bailouts.  [mocking Romney] “I don’t want to get rid of all of ObamaCare, just the nasty parts.”  Oh, that’s a relief.  So now the whole repeal thing is off the table.  Then you have John Boehner weighing in back in August, [mocking Boehner] “We’re not gonna have a debate over the debt and deficit in this campaign.  It’s going to be a clean campaign.  It’s gonna be a good campaign, but it’s not gonna be about the debt or deficit.”  So they removed debt and deficit from it.

Then there’s foreign policy.  Was there an opening for the President to be cremated on this catastrophe in Libya?  Yes.  It’s not because he didn’t get in there with enough Marines and bomb and act quick enough.  I heard Andrea Saul on with Martha MacCallum yesterday.  Oh, my, this was just absolutely dreadful.  Martha MacCallum just throws the softball out there.  [mocking MacCallum] “I mean, these Iranians are our biggest enemies and then you have this thing in Libya.  What would Governor Romney do about that?”  [mocking Saul] “You’re absolutely right, Martha.  President Obama is lead from behind.  What we needed was bold and decisive action in Libya.”  Yeah, that’s what we needed.  That’s what I would campaign on.  Mitt, being a bigger abuser of constitutional war powers, that’ll go over well.

You know what it is at the end of the day?  Daniel Larison wrote about this at The American Conservative.  You know what it is at the end of the day?  The decepticons, the frauds that call themselves conservative that make up most of the establishment and the establishment media of the Republican Party, cannot, will not, and I believe probably never will admit that the eight years of Bush were some of the most catastrophically bad years in American presidential history.  The welfare state was expanded unlike it had been expanded since Lyndon Baines Johnson began it in the 1960’s.  The warfare state was expanded beyond anyone’s wildest nightmare.  Notice I didn’t say dreams.  The surveillance, civil rights abuse state was — just name your malady that we have a general government that’s supposed to prevent from happening and it happened during the Bush years.  The Iraq War, most Americans now think, was an absolutely tremendous, atrocious, tragic mistake.  Not the decepticons, though.  That’s the greatest thing we ever did.  They’re basing their narrative on the fact that you want more of 2000 to 2008.  How’s that selling?  It’s not selling.  It is tragic that there is a missed opportunity here.

You have the debates coming up.  The president is still unbelievably vulnerable on all these things, and he could be beaten, clobbered.  Landslide he should lose by.  Will it happen?  I don’t know.  AG, you were talking about this earlier, about the first debate being key.  Maybe this is where people actually start tuning in and saying, “Maybe I should look at these candidates.”  Maybe they’ve already, in our mass media-infused culture, maybe they’ve already looked and maybe they’ve already decided, “I think I’m going to stay home and play Battleship that morning.”

AG:  I was watching either Fox or MSNBC, one of the TV shows was showing a lot of the Reagan debate clips and how he was really able to turn the tide with a couple good lines here and there during debates.  Granted, it’s a completely different media culture with Twitter and the availability of breaking news to be at your fingertips whenever you want it, so maybe you don’t have the same sort of impact from a debate.  I kind of think Romney needs a good couple lines in that first debate to drum up interest in the campaign.  We don’t hear a lot of what Paul Ryan is doing on the campaign trail.  That bump really quickly died out.  We’ve had Tim Pawlenty now step down.  Whether or not he’s an excitable guy on the campaign trail.

Mike:  You’re following this closer than I am because I just don’t, it just doesn’t interest me.  How high

up was Pawlenty?  He was just a Romney advisor?  He was one of the guys that goes on television?

AG:  If he wasn’t his national campaign director, I’ll see the exact title, but for him to step down now and take a lobbying / consulting job, it’s very strange.

Mike:  That’s surprising.

AG:  He was his campaign co-chair, which is high up.

Mike:  You don’t drop out of that.  Let me just point out the greatest irony of all ironies here, and the Pawlenty thing makes this point even the more salient and applicable today.  The Romney résumé is that he is the manager dude.  He is the CEO.  He’s the turnaround man.  He runs those companies, turns the losers into winners, does all these things, right?  What is the campaign?  The campaign is a company.  It’s an endeavor.  How many millions have been raised?  He’s raised some ungodly amount of money, like $350, $400 million, something like that.  The campaign is a company.

I used to say this about President Obama in 2008 and many of you would get angry at me, but it’s the truth.  You can say what you want about Obama being a socialist and Marxist and all that.  Those socialists and Marxists sure as hell know how to raise an awful lot of seed money capital, don’t they?  They know how to spend it, too, don’t they?  It is vicious.  It is disgusting in many instances.  It is character assassination if not outright libel and slander, but it’s effective.  The Obama campaign basically invented of perfected, after Ron Paul of course, online fundraising, didn’t it?  Isn’t that the greatest irony of ironies, though, that the great businessman can’t run the business of the campaign as it’s a Staples or one of those companies?  Maybe politics, as I’ve always told you, fair listener, wonderful fan out there, maybe politics isn’t business.  It’s not business.  Romney might be a great example of why you don’t want it to be business.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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