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A few weeks back, the higher powers here at TIME put presidential hopeful Mitt Romney on the cover with a flattering photo and an unflattering headline that captured the moment: “Why Don’t They Like Me?” After months of see saw polling, Newt Gingrich was ascending. On the trail, Romney responded with his disciplined cheerfulness. When [...]
Start with the numbers: Seven candidates. Eight months of competition. 13 debates. $13 million in mostly vicious and anonymous TV attack ads. A final day with 23 events in a state of 3 million people. The simple goal: Convince some small fraction, maybe 120,000 souls, to give up their Tuesday night, sit in a room for an hour and help determine the fate of a fearful nation. Get just a fraction of that fraction, maybe 30,000, to support you, and you carry the day.
Des Moines, Iowa For Mitt Romney’s campaign, there’s no question whom this election is really about. “Let’s be real clear, Barack Obama came out to Iowa and he talked about hope and change,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told a crowd of hundreds who gathered Friday morning to hear Romney speak outside a grocery store [...]
Clinton, Iowa As Mitt Romney enters the final stretch in Iowa, poll numbers rising, crowds appearing, the inevitability beginning to sink in, his message is honed down, lean and mean, with declarative sentences that slice the air with the flashy precision of a fruit ninja. “I love this country,” he says, as if this sets [...]
The new and improved Romney travels the country not with a list, but with a story. “This is an election not to replace a President but to save a vision of America. It’s a choice between two destinies,” he said a few weeks back in New Hampshire. “This will be a campaign about the soul of America, about American greatness. I’m confident that Americans won’t settle for an excuse that ‘it could be worse.’”
“Coxcomb” is the O’Reilly Factor word of the day. It means “foolish dandy who is overly impressed by his own accomplishments,” and it flashes on the Fox News screen, just a moment before the start of the 13th Republican presidential primary debate, the last debate before the Jan. 3 Iowa caucuses. Bill O’Reilly is either devilishly clever, or he’s such a coxcomb he knows not what he does. But still, he has done it. Another feather in his cap.
Romney campaign strategist Stuart Stevens wrote a fine book about his work for George W. Bush on the 2000 presidential campaign, and he aptly describes the moment in just about every big-ticket campaign when the candidate opts to go negative. “You resolve to endure pain to inflict pain. It’s Serb vs. Muslim, Hatfield vs. McCoy, [...]
Don’t call it an attack. It’s a “contrast” that was debuted Thursday morning, Mitt Romney’s attempt to set up a clear choice for Republicans as they enter the final weeks of a suddenly exciting campaign: Romney The Not-Entirely Likable vs. Newt Gingrich The Entirely Unreliable.
Officially, Barack Obama has better things to worry about. “We’re not very focused on that race,” White House spokesman Jay Carney tells reporters about the Republican presidential primary. But those same reporters are bombarded with a dozen e-mails a day from the Democratic National Committee, which Obama effectively controls, trying to mess with the Republican [...]
