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Mitt Romney Says Obama Has Given Up but is Romney even Trying?

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Last updated on February 8th, 2013 at 05:08 pm

By now, certainly, everyone has noticed Mitt Romney’s campaign is in deep trouble. It is ugly, folks. In fact, it is difficult to imagine what he could do to make things worse. Here we have a guy who says he is running on his powers as a CEO and he has completely bungled his campaign. He cannot blame anyone else. The bucks stops at Mitt’s desk.

It is so bad that Leslie Savan at The Nation wonders if Mitt even really wants to be president, if the nomination wasn’t enough validation. She makes that point that “Every time Romney gets an opportunity to reset the narrative of the election, he makes some psychologically revealing mistake,” and avails herself of some compelling evidence:

“There’s not really a campaign here,” one Republican close to GOP fundraisers complained to Real Clear Politics. “He’s getting ready for the debates, and he’s out fundraising. You’ve got enough money!” Lindsey Graham and Peggy Noonan have also bemoaned his semi-AWOL schedule.

It really does seem as if Mitt is trying to lose – or at the least – not trying to win. If I were a Republican, I would be very, very concerned.

Because this election is not supposed to be about Mitt Romney. And you wonder if Mitt might have forgotten that. Or if he ever even realized it.

He is going through the motions but you really do have to wonder. CNN reports that the Romney campaign is embarking on a “new line of attack against Obama” but at this point a new line of attack would be not saying egregiously stupid things, which, where Mitt is concerned, seems to be an impossibility.

Fox News trumpets Mitt’s new offensive, his attack on Obama for saying that changing Washington must come from the outside.

Watch the latest video at <a href=”http://video.foxnews.com”>video.foxnews.com</a>Here you have the Tea Party going on for the past four years about how you’ve got to be an outsider, how you’ve got to get rid of insiders, and then Romney jumps up and says that inside is a good place to be. And sticking with his attempts to make Obama look weak, he claims Obama has raised “the white flag of surrender.”

“The president today threw in the white flag of surrender again. He said he can’t change Washington from inside, he can only change it from outside,” Romney said. “Well, we’re going to give him that chance in November. He’s going outside!

“I can change Washington, I will change Washington. We’ll get the job done from the inside. Republicans and Democrats will come together. He can’t do it.”

I wonder if he realizes how stupid that sounds after the past four years of Republican obstructionism; if he is even aware that Senate Republicans just refused to allow votes on 17 judicial nominees before going on recess.

Work together? Really? At what point in the past four years has any Republican worked together with Barack Obama without losing his job, like Charlie Crist, former Republican governor of Florida?

And I truly hope using ancient, deceptively edited videos of Obama from when he was a state senator are not part of this new line of attack, because that sort of backfired too. It is pretty bad in this day and age when a Republican presidential campaign can get skewered by a mainstream news outlet, NBC in this case. The whole fiasco is symptomatic of how poorly Mitt is managing his own campaign.

And yet the entitled Ann Romney tells the Republican Party they’re lucky to have Mitt. “If you love someone, you see them maligned, attacked, all these things that happen in a campaign, you get very defensive” doesn’t quite cut it. As Sarah Jones and Jason Easley said here last night, “In other words, stop maligning Mitt Romney with his own words!”

There’s an expression used in the NFL with regards to one team “running up the score” on another: If you don’t want the score run up on you, do not let the other team score.

This applies to the Romney Campaign as well. If you do not want scorn heaped on you, stop saying stupid things. The regularity with which Mitt sticks his foot in his mouth is really unprecedented except, perhaps, in comparison to Sarah Palin. But Palin was only a vice presidential candidate. She wasn’t running for the highest office in the land except in her own mind.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mitt Romney wants to convince Ameicans that Obama has quit on them in order to cover up the fact that he himself isn’t even really trying. Maybe Mr. Entitled doesn’t understand that he has to, that he doesn’t get the job just because he thinks it should be his.

Typically, the mainstream media makes excuses, like CNN Chief National Correspondent John King’s, ”I cannot think of one campaign that has not had a rough patch like this, including then Sen. Obama’s campaign back in 2008.”

Seriously, John? You cannot compare them.

And here’s the truly funny part, the part that is so revealing about how out of touch both Romney and mediia are, from CNN’s Tom Cohen:

The Romney team has struggled to build momentum after a grueling primary race, stymied at times by self-inflicted wounds that have helped fuel a Democratic depiction of the multimillionaire former businessman as being out-of-touch with working-class Americans.

Wrong. The Democrats have not depicted Romney as an out-of-touch multimillionaire businessman. Romney is those things. And he either doesn’t bother, or doesn’t know how to hide it. It almost seems to pain him to say that he cares about people when he self-evidently does not. He really is that out of touch with the reality experienced by not only the 47 percent but the 99 percent.

Until the Romney campaign realizes this simple fact (their candidate’s out-of-synch reality bubble), they will not be able to turn anything around. We know that won’t happen because Romney himself is incapable of seeing just how isolated from reality he is.

And it is difficult to see how the upcoming debates will bring positive change. Romney will still be Romney, and that is what is sinking the Republican ship right now. The proper response is not to send his wife out to petulantly whine about people using her husband’s words against him. The proper response is to get Romney to act like a president and not a guy who made his living firing people; a guy who opens his mouth without thinking.

The disdain of a rich white millinaire for his social inferiors is what rings loud and clear in the eyes and ears of voters.

Well, that and Romney’s complete lack of new ideas and inability to articulate those ideas he might have. I say “might” because there is no evidence at all – to date – that Romney actually has any ideas. And he is going to be put on the spot at the debates. If he declines even then to offer voters some details of his plans, he might as well resign then and there and go back to ruining peoples’ lives, because that is something he is apparently very good at. I am just going to throw Ann Romney’s words back at her at this point: ‘Stop it. This is hard.”

You’re killing us, and we’d just as soon keep the killing to a bad dream what-might-have-been.

Photo from cfnews13.com

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Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen's Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.

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