The first candidate, of course, is Mitt Romney, and the second is John McCain. Here’s McCain on the situation in Michigan:
“I’ve got to give you some straight talk: Some of the jobs that have left the state of Michigan are not coming back,” McCain said Wednesday in Grand Rapids. “They are not. And I am sorry to tell you that.” … [I]t “wasn’t government’s job to protect buggy factories and haberdashers when cars replaced carriages and men stopped wearing hats. But it is government’s job to help workers get the education and training they need for the new jobs that will be created by new businesses in this new century.”
For those displaced by job loss, McCain has proposed new worker-retraining and short-term unemployment programs and suggested subsidies that would offset a disparity in salary for those moving to lower-paying work.
That’s obviously true, right? The economy is changing rapidly, with y’know, like, globalization and everything, and states like Michigan have been slow to react. Result: job loss, and rough times in the rust belt. So the sensible thing to do is figure out how to get ahead of the change, or at least keep up with it, by helping those whose skills need some updating to get the help they need.
Now, Mitt Romney’s a business guy, or so he says. He, among all the candidates running for president, should get this — he’s a capitalist, for God’s sake. His pre-politics career was supposedly all about turning around enterprises by retooling them. Here’s what he said about those days:
“Sometimes the medicine is a little bitter but it is necessary to save the life of the patient,” he said. “My job was to try and make the enterprise successful, and in my view the best security a family can have is that the business they work for is strong.”
But there will be no talk from Romney of “bitter medicine” in Michigan — no sirree. Here, rather, is what Romney has to say about McCain’s words about jobs in Michigan:
“He said, you know, some jobs have left Michigan that are never coming back. I disagree,” Romney said…. “I’m not willing to accept defeat like that,” Romney said.
Rubbish. Romney knows full well that obsolete jobs in Michigan are not coming back. He just can’t bring himself to say it out loud, because he thinks that if he just talks happy talk about believing in America, people will vote for him.
What a tragedy the Romney campaign is. Here’s an indisputably smart and successful guy who could have run an interesting and competitive campaign, if he had only run as what he is: a Club for Growth, Wall Street conservative who believes deeply in free markets as a way to create a rising tide that lifts all boats. My guess is that that guy also understands that immigration is a complicated issue and that the reactionary talk-radio approach to it will hurt American business, and also that he doesn’t really care much about social issues as long as people basically mind their own business. But no. Some lame-ass consultant decided that that guy couldn’t win in Iowa and New Hampshire, and Romney believed it, so instead Romney created a new, incoherent, and utterly unconvincing persona for himself. As a result, he lost Iowa and New Hampshire, and he will probably lose Michigan too.
In other Romney-related news, George Romney’s Lieutenant Governor (and Michigan Governor in his own right for 14 years) William Milliken has endorsed John McCain:
“I was a great admirer of his father,” Milliken told the Detroit News. “But Mitt Romney has been a disappointment to me because he has changed his socially responsible positions he took as governor of Massachusetts. I don’t have the respect for him that I had for his father.”
Ouch.
Mitt Romney is a jerk of the highest order. He proved that when he was governor of the Bay State, and he’s proven it just now.
Lol …
Might just be me, but my take is that the biggest story to come out of Michigan this year will be that THE PARTY has told the people of Michigan to screw off; that what they think doesnt matter one flipping bit.
Ah well, why don’t people crack jokes and maybe even go out and vote for the lamest Republican just so people can say that they got to participate in the process. Thats how democracy should work, isnt it? Can you say YES MASTAH? Better practice up on your groveling skills.
The party will select for you and this is for the best because THE PARTY knows best what you realy want.
Christ, with this whole condensed frontloaded primary schedual where THE PARTY has already divided up THEIR SUPERDELEGATES why do they even bother to shake people down for hundreds of millions of dollars just to grease the media with the cash when all along they already have picked your candidate …
Is it that entertaining? Its a good show with all the talking heads and graphics on the tv and all but really … Why not just get over it and say 4 more years, so we can get back to watching “Biggest Loser?
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p>Pass me another beer Edith ….
via Atrios.
how do you do the youtube embed?
If you watch the YouTube video to the end, an embed box appears with some stuff beneath it. For this video, the stuff looks like this:
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p><object width=”425″ height=”373″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/PiCqxKLIVDY&rel=1&border=1″></param><param name=”wmode” value=”transparent”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/PiCqxKLIVDY&rel=1&border=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” wmode=”transparent” width=”425″ height=”373″></embed></object>
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p>Simply paste that into your comment. Click preview as a precaution. And you’re ready to go.
The Loneliest Icelander which makes hilarious fun of Bush’s overstated Coalition of the Willing.
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p>Feel free to copy and share…
the CAFE standards again? I wasn’t paying close attention, but at this point, I wouldn’t put anything past the Mittster.
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p>…discontinuous CAFE leaps…
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p>…apparently they don’t teach what a “discontinuous” mathematical function is in B-school.
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p>…and absent consideration of competitiveness…
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p>Apparently, Romney is to ignorant to understand two things. If American labeled auto-makers want to dump their gas-guzzlers in other countries, they would not be subject to US’s CAFE standards. But if foreign-labeled auto-makers want to sell into the US, the US standards would apply to those vehicles.
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p>I’m still getting a chuckle over the “discontinus” portion of the speech. I suppose I shouldn’t be too hard on him–hie was only a lit major in undergrad school. Maybe he can lecture us about Beowulf.