Last updated on February 7th, 2013 at 06:59 pm
Things are unraveling at the Romney campaign.
Univision says that during his townhall with them, not only did the Romney campaign pack the hall with non-students because they couldn’t find enough supporters on campus, but when the anchor gave an introduction to Mitt that he didn’t like, he refused to go on until they re-taped it. A Republican present called it a “temper tantrum”.
Buzzfeed reports:
That wouldn’t be the last demand from the campaign: Romney himself almost pulled the plug on the whole thing minutes before the broadcast, Salinas said.
While introducing Romney at the top of the broadcast, Salinas’s co-anchor, Jorge Ramos, noted that the Republican candidate had agreed to give the network 35 minutes, and that Obama had agreed to a full hour the next night. Ramos then invited the audience to welcome Romney to the stage — but the candidate didn’t materialize.
“It was a very awkward moment, believe me,” Salinas said.
Apparently, Romney took issue with the anchors beginning the broadcast that way, said Salinas, and he refused to go on stage until they re-taped the introduction. (One Republican present at the taping said Romney “threw a tantrum.”)
Making last minute “demands” that would ensure his success, indeed threatening to “reschedule” if he wasn’t allowed an exemption to the student only rule and then packing the forum with rowdy, bused-in supporters who ignored the rules not to applaud, the Romney campaign later gloated that the Hispanic forum was more “excited” for Mitt than for Obama, whose also partisan crowd did not ignore the rules.
The image of “excitement” was apparently nothing but a carefully constructed mirage, propped up backstage manipulations and string pulling. The Univision host seemed put out by the disrespect shown by the bused-in Romney crowd, who booed questions while cheering the candidate as if the forum were a rally. All the worlds a stage.
This behavior is reminiscent of Mitt Romney’s temper tantrum as Governor after his party lost the midterms. He reportedly was hardly ever seen after that, spending 212 days out of the state campaigning for the presidency in his last year on office. In 2006, “his disapproval ratings hit a new low with 65 percent of residents disapproving of his job performance, as residents grumbled that he was never around.”
Mitt Romney’s Republican opponents during the primaries also observed this sort of behavior, saying he was cold and aloof, and came after them with unnecessarily negative ads.
Mitt has been telling reporters that he is not his campaign and therefor his comments about the 47 percent of Americans can’t be held against him. Meanwhile, his wife Ann (his “secret weapon”) canceled her interviews with reporters after her “stop it” debacle. If Mitt is out of his campaign as a person and Ann is being hidden in a time out until she can stop ordering Republicans around, you have to wonder just who will carry the mantle for the tax the poor ruse.
Paul Ryan? The architect of turn Medicare into a voucher program and kill Social Security Paul Ryan, who was booed even though he brought his mother with him to the AARP townhall?
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