Mitt Romney has a new favorite word. No, it’s not “corporation.” It’s “wheelhouse.” The baseball term describing the arc of a hitter’s most powerful swing.
Here’s Mitt in Berlin, New Hampshire on Tuesday:
And right now the issue that the American people care most about – and that I care deeply about and have for a long time – is the economy, short term and long term. That’s what I know, that’s in my wheelhouse.
He’s saying this everywhere he goes. And he has everybody else saying it, too. Watch out Barack Obama – the economy is right in Mitt Romney’s wheelhouse. Politico, CBSNews, ABCNews: wheelhouse, wheelhouse,
wheelhouse.
Let us consider what he is really telling us (with his typical self-regard, suggesting that he is the kind of guy who even HAS a wheelhouse). Our economy is suffering from the highest unemployment in decades. Unemployment is something that he’s an expert in creating. Like many of his fellow venture capitalists, Mitt Romney has made a career and a fortune seizing successful companies, amputating them to maximize shareholder profit and disposing of the waste. That waste, as it were, is us. We’re in the range of nine percent now and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.
Picking Mitt Romney because the economy is in his wheelhouse is asking to be the baseball in this scenario. Crushed.
At the Republican debates, he was asked specifically about his record of causing unemployment. (I think the questioner mentioned AmPad.) I thought Romney’s response was some ingenuous. He said that lots of people in government don’t understand business; they imagine all businesses succeed if you work hard enough at it. That’s not true, he said. Some succeed. Some fail. A successful businessman (I’m paraphrasing Romney, remember) will have some failures, too.
In other words, he used the question as an opportunity to push his credibility as someone from the world of business.
By the way, an extremely useful reference collection is available here. It’s even formatted nicely for your mobile device in case you suddenly find yourself having to argue about Romney.
I thought Romney’s response was somewhat ingenuous.
…with the theory that we should run government like a business, or that success in business translates to competence in government. Businesses do either succeed or fail, but the government CANNOT fail to provide what it needs for the people. If it does we all fail. BTW, wheelhouse is hardly a new term for area of expertise. I didn’t realize its baseball origins.
“Increasing national security through governmental transparency and the enforcement of human rights across the globe — that’s in my wheelhouse.”
— Dick Cheney
You know, something that allows him to change direction?
Poor, poor Mitt. He’s also trying to run his campaign like a business — changing his PowerPoints to try to match fickle public opinion and so on — and it’s likely to make him look as inconsequential, craven, and insincere as it did last time, with the same results.
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I most certainly did click the “Reply” button under dgc’s comment above, and it did nest when the page reloaded. Now, it’s not nested. Could Bob’s later comment have somehow displaced mine?
3.6.20
I’ve had fairly good luck with Firefox on this site, though, I’m on 6.0 now.
As I said, the comment was nested, now it isn’t. Those conditions are not controlled by my browser.
so I think the user agent, er, I mean, browser has some effect.
PP used to always pack all his/her comments into the title. On this platform, that is discouraged, I note.
One trick I’ve tried is to make the body of the comment consist entirely of an invalid tag, e.g., <frog/>
However, when I do that, the comment shows up in no archive and doesn’t appear in the left column of the main page. It’s invisible.
I guess the frog doesn’t want to be noticed.
I do like being able to tweet so easily. So there are tradeoffs – just as in thinking of himself as “nimble” Romney appears to be the King of the Flip Flops, because someone with real convictions and integrity doesn’t change with the polls and the wind, and the headlines of the day – instead they make headlines and lead by changing the world around them – leadership is being the one to set the pace and the dialog and fight for values and a future that may not be popular – until you make it happen. I don’t think Mitt gets that, at all. It is a kind of tragic defensive rigidity that seems to do him in.
negative comments about Romney would not go unanswered…
n/t
Some folks go on vacation w/o computers after all!
I went out of range for four days last weekend – no phone no internet, heck no reading anything either – and then went right back to constantly reading screens, and my eyes couldn’t handle it, I think I need reading glasses now.
btw, I’m testing the nesting here…this should be nested