The primary in Florida is now in the books and Romney appears to be on his way; a big win for Mitt, but at what cost? I guess Romney proved he can get down into the mud and sling it with Newt but he spent four or five times as much money as Gingrich to achieve it. So was it the mud slinging by itself or was it the sheer volume of it?
I suspect that with apparently unlimited funds Romney can steamroll the field doing negative campaigning. I am not comforted by this win. If the old adage “the one who pays the fiddler gets to call the tune” is true, then who now owns Mitt Romney? I seriously doubt it’s regular folks like us.
At this point in the campaign I have to admit that I’m a Newt fan. In spite of his baggage I think he is a leader where I have my doubts about Romney. For folks of my persuasion I think Newt’s more likely to fight for the Constitution than Romney. Strangely, I think of him as being more predictable than Romney. Maybe not in the sense that he will go along with mainline Republicans, but that he will be his own man. Some of us are not comfortable with mainline Republicans currently in positions of leadership in the Congress. Their priorities are not consistent with my own. As a matter of fact, their priorities are strangely similar to many of the mainstream Democrats. Get re-elected and let the Goldman Sachs bureaucrats call all the shots.
One of my big problems with Romney is his lack of consistency on important issues. Another maybe more important problem is his roots deep within the ranks of the Goldman Sachs/Wall Street insider crowd. In my view, some of those guys were clearly criminals and many others were borderline but I doubt that Romney’s Justice Department would be any more likely to pursue them than Obama’s has.
If there is a basis for the Occupy Wall Street movement it’s the failure of the government to prosecute anyone for the Fannie/Freddie debacle or the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. If there were no criminal acts perpetrated during that whole time by any of the companies that either failed or were bailed out I would be astounded. And if those guys were allowed to conduct their businesses in such a way that so many of us were exposed to unimaginable risks, the government regulators should be prosecuted. Or if the law of the land is written such that everything was legal then our Congress should be impeached and sent to prison. Somebody besides everyday Americans has to be held responsible.
The government spends considerable funds pursuing blue collar criminals but sadly the white collar criminals responsible for collapsing the housing and mortgage industries are walking free with millions of dollars at the expense of the rest of us. What message is the government sending with no prosecution for any of the culprits responsible for a multi-trillion dollar scandal?
If those mucky mucks at Fannie and Freddie were justifiably rewarded with hundreds of millions in bonuses then the folks who authorized those contracts should be in prison.
I don’t know that Mitt Romney is owned by the Wall Street crowd, but I fear he is beholding to them enough that justice will never be served if we are counting on President Romney to pursue them. Mitt Romney’s record exposes a guy who is not a fighter. Romney goes along to get along and that is not the kind of guy I want in the White House.
When the Red Phone rings in the middle of the night I think I would prefer that Newt or even Rick Santorum answered rather than Mitt Milquetoast Romney.
Chris Christie, John McCain and a slug of other Republicans assure us that Mitt’s the man for the job. I guess only time will tell. I hope that there is substance in their support rather than a fear of Newt Gingrich driving their efforts to get Romney elected.
I know our country cannot take another four years of Obama so if Mitt’s “our” guy and we all work to get him elected then we will find out if he’s the good guy John and Chris say he is. I pray for our country that they are right.
No Loss for Words 
Do Nothing, Done Nothing
by Steve DanaConsidering the fact that prior to being elected President, Barrack Obama hardly had a job and quite possibly never even worked for a “for profit” company, he seems mighty confident in criticizing Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s record of achievement let alone his net jobs created record at Bain Capital.
The President stood there this week talking about how Romney’s work experiences from Bain Capital to the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics to Governor of Massachusetts hardly prepared him to be President of the United States.
President Obama seems to think his three years in office give him the experience edge even in light of the multiple failures of his administration. He can legitimately claim credit for taking out bin Laden. It took ten years to track him down and whether the Bush Administration contributed to the successful outcome or not, US military forces got the job done. So is that the foundation of his Foreign Policy? I read somewhere that right up to the hour before the mission was launched, Valerie Jarret was pushing Obama to abandon the mission.
The Arab Spring will prove to be significant in history as the time when America could have helped shape the evolution of free society in the Middle East but twiddled our thumbs as the opportunity faded away.
Then of course there is the Keystone Pipeline deal that had been through the approval process but needed Presidential approval that fell by the wayside in spite of the tens of thousands of jobs that would be created, the Solyndra half billion dollar debacle, the Fast and Furious guns to Mexico deal and the million dollar GSA junket to Vegas as examples of the President’s record of either personally deciding or delegating decisions to his appointees; example after example of failures of leadership to be sure but indicators also of a seriously incompetent or corrupt administration.
The President can talk about Romney’s record all he wants but how can he not expect us to compare Romney’s record to his own.
I’m still astonished with the way the General Motors deal was done. Rather than letting the company enter some form of bankruptcy protection that would give the share holders and managers time to renegotiate debt payments and labor contracts the President instructed the government to seize the company, infuse it with enough federal stimulus money to get it through the financial crisis in exchange for high priority shares of stock rendering privately held shares relatively worthless while at the same time preserving the labor contracts that contributed so much to the underlying problems. Is that even legal?
The President talks about how he is a job creator but in my mind, jobs that go away when the government money goes away are not jobs. A real job is a man or woman creating something of value that someone else is willing to pay a market price for. A real job sustains itself.
My final issue is the glut of regulation that flows out of the various federal departments. Anyone who has ever been in business knows the impact changing regulations to a business plan. If you don’t know how the Obama Health Care law will impact your business, it’s not likely that you will hire new employees unless your existing workers are being worked to the bone. Unpredictable regulatory times are a huge impediment to job creation. But it isn’t just the changes, it’s the volume of the regulations. Thousands of pages of new federal regulations fly out of the Environmental Protection Administration, Department of Energy, Department of Commerce, Department of Education and the Department of Transportation each week.
President Obama needs to show us examples of how his buddy politics policies have created jobs since so many of his showcase plays have been unmitigated disasters.
The President should be careful how he characterizes Romney’s qualifications since his own record shows he clearly had no experience at anything except being a slick talking lawyer before he was elected.
I don’t believe Obama has ever served a full term of office in any job he ran for so his record as a legislator is bare as well.
If there were ever a “Do Nothing, Done Nothing!” president, Obama is tops.
Posted in Federal Government, Foreign Affairs, Political commentary, Presidential Politics | Leave a Comment »