Jane Swift: If Republicans nominate flip-flip Romney, they'll lose
YOU'VE SEEN the cover stories. You've heard the jokes. Mitt Romney's flip flops have provided endless fodder for the late night talk show circuit. But just beneath the humorous surface lies the Democratic strategy for defeating a Romney ticket come November, and history shows this strategy works.
… [A] funny thing has happened on the way to the White House. Today, Mitt Romney is campaigning on his record as governor; yet he has become unrecognizable to the citizens who voted him into office.
It goes on … oh, how it goes on. (HT: Political Intelligence.)
Now, it's fair to say that Romney rescued Swift and the MA GOP from her own doomed candidacy in 2002. But it's also true that Mitt has become prit-near unrecognizable to people here; he's cast off all the positions that allowed him to get elected in the first place. And would he be taken seriously at all as a candidate, were he not a former governor?
If Mitt actually wins the primary, it will show that GOP voters have a heavy, heavy tolerance for irony.
I cannot imagine anyone who recalls or experienced Jane Swift’s calamitous gubernatorial interregnum being influenced by her views on the most electable and strongest Republican presidential candidate.
<
p>Indeed, I am sure that many of the southern New Hampshire Republican and Independent voters she is currently courting on behalf of McCain are political refugees who fled a Commonwealth that was hemmorrhaging revenues, businsses, and citizens during her nearly two-year tenure (April 2001-January 2003) as (Play) Acting Governor.
<
p>While Cellucci left Swift a horrendous fiscal mess to manage, Swift’s political accomplishments were pretty much limited to instituting a full-employment program for State Police helicopter pilots. Given her fondness for the government-subsidized transportation, perhaps, Giuliani would have been a more suitable choice for Calamity Jane.
She took a royal screwing from the press and her own party, and it wasn’t fair.