“The untruthful attacks on Massachusetts that Deval Patrick’s campaign has put forward over the last three or four months are going to do irreparable harm to this state,” said Romney, who, as a potential 2008 presidential candidate, has been vigorously defending his State House legacy.
Wait, let me get this straight: Deval’s assessment of the way Romney and co. have run the state’s and it’s cities’ economies into the ground and the factual statements about our state losing population are what might do harm to the state? Not his-Mittness’s jokes around the country at the state’s expense? Or, perhaps, Mitt’s actual tenure as governor is what might have done the allegedly irreparable harm.
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His Expediency’s rhetoric is increasingly over-the-top because he realizes that Deval exposed him for his shameful Massachusetts-bashing. The Mittwit doesn’t care what anyone here thinks-he’s washed his hands of this state; but he’s got to be able to convince Republicans around the country he didn’t destroy the Bay State GOP, which of course he has. Electing Deval, hopefully in a landslide, will be the Bay State’s first opportunity to avenge itself on Slick Willard. If he gets traction nationally, there will be an uprising of latter-day “swift boat veterans” here the likes of which we haven’t seen since Shay’s rebellion.
Romney will never lose a vote by bashing Massachusetts, nor by being unpopular here, even to the point of losing the GOP candidate the election. If anything, for him these are credentials to be polished.
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Think about it in reverse: a Democrat wins the governor’s office in, say, Mississippi, running as a milquetoast moderate, and then takes a very hard turn to the far left. Universal healthcare, single payer! Affirmative action quotas! Huge tax hikes for non-poor individuals and all businesses! Free money for everyone else! Diebold banished! Mega-strict environmental enforcement, with penalties so punitive that offending individuals and businesses lose all! Marijuana legalized! Gays allowed to marry! This is highly unpopular in Mississppi, and in the next election, there is a landslide for the Republican candidate.
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When that Democratic governor runs nationally, do you think liberals will hold it against him that he was unpopular in Mississippi? Or would that unpopularity be a badge of honor cementing his liberal bona fides?
What’s the equivalent in your analogy to screwing up on the Big Dig, or waiting until the day before the election to help his own candidate, or running for President as a wingnut after the wingnut fad has already run its course and is starting its downturn? If he thinks a few queer jokes are going to do it for him in two years, he’s in for an unpleasant surprise, especially if the Democrats are wise enough to
lock the DLC in a dungeontake a few pages out of Deval’s playbook (and burn John Kerry’s).<
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The “credential-polishing” he’s trying to do is like trying to sell sushi door-to-door the day after Pearl Harbor. Good luck with that, Mitt.
But I suspect that the ebb of the evangelical’s power may be an artifact of this mid-term. People get up for a presidential election, and evangelicals have huge clout in the GOP.
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The pool of potential candidates for conservative evangelicals’ affections is small. With Allen apparently self-destructing ( at least for 2008) the pool may be: Romney.
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McCain may use the Big Dig as a cudgel, but I don’t think it will cut ice with the evangelicals if they have settled on Romney, since the they hate McCain for past apostasy.
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As far as what he has done for Healy, I don’t think that it will hurt him at all. Outside of New England, the Republican governors of Massachusetts have been perceived to be “RINOs” unworthy of support or mention. It is remarkable that Romney broke through this, given his own seeming moderation in 2002.
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I think it is going to be Romney and McCain, with Romney out to McCain’s right, which isn’t a bad place to be in the primaries.
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It would be nice to see a Gary Bauer or someone step to get in Romney’s way.
I think evangelical voters, if maybe not the hard-core, see the value of building public works projects that aren’t mismanaged and neglected to the point they drop on top of passing motorists. Big Dig bashing ties the Mittwit to everything wrong with the state of Massachusetts, and the whole Republican field will pile on if he gets momentum.
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