SomethingAwful.com writer Zack Parsons said on his website [SIC] that Mitt Romney should shut up about how he “saved the 2002 Olympics” because “no one cares”, using Romneys own website as an example:

Whenever I hear Mitt Romney touting his credentials as a candidate for President, I can be sure that at some point he’s going to mention that he “saved the Olympics.” He literally mentions it in every major speech. On his Why Romney website “Saving the 2002 Salt Lake Olympics” is the title of the second section. He thinks “Saving the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City” is only slightly less important than “Business” when it comes to impressing people with his experience.

“WhyRomney is not an official Romney site and Romney is not responsible in any way for our content.”

This information can also be found on the sites “About Us” page which is linked to on every page of the website.

The following clip is from the Michael Medved radio show:

Todd Palin has endorsed Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin had said she would have voted for Newt in South Carolina, Florida and Nevada but has come short of officially endorsing him.

MyWay.com chose an…interesting photo of Mitt Romney to post in this story by the AP. The photo (also by the AP) show’s the candidate stepping off a platform, getting a little help from the front and back.

Here is a larger version of the photo:

As the Perry campaign continues a downward fall, buzz over Newt Gingrich is rising in its place. Could a surprise still happen? Around here we are starting to make predictions…

CandidatesBlog contributor, Ryan Larsen says:

I predict Newt Gingrich will win Iowa and after that the field will narrow to Newt and Mitt. Of course, I want Mitt to win Iowa, but with the other candidates tanking I think the right-wing media is coalescing around Newt, and the people will follow.

This can work out very well for Mitt, because Newt’s intellect is unimpeachable. Romney and Newt need to have one-on-one substantive debates – the type Gingrich wants anyway – and this will finally offer Romney a chance to showcase his own intellect. When he runs circles around Newt, the way he did in the back-and-forth on mandates in a recent debate, everyone watching will finally see how intelligent Romney is. They will see that it’s not just “skills” and being “slick” but it’s sheer brilliance. Romney ONLY gets flustered when others are denying him a chance to talk. Gingrich won’t do that, and Romney will correspondingly shine.

I’m skeptical about Newt winning Iowa but agree about everything else. Iowa is a mystery to me. It seems like its natural Santorum territory but he’s practically moved there and is still at 1 percentiness. There’s definitely a surprise lurking in the weeds, im just not sure what or where. but I think Mitt has the best shot since no matter what 2 people he’s down to, he comes out on top:

Romney vs Perry = Romney on communication & economics
Romney vs Gingrich = Romney on clean record
Romney vs Cain = Romney on experience & clean record

The only threat I can see being credible against Romney on communication, squeaky clean record, economics and private and public experience is Huntsman and theres no evidence that he’s gonna make it down to the 2-man stretch.

Gawker has an interesting headline The Old Mitt Romney Photo That He Probably Wants Destroyed

Time’s Michael Scherer digs up this photo from the Romney media archives showing our man Mittens and his old Bain Capital buddies playing with money.

Look at them, hugging and eating and rubbing and sucking their corporate-raider money. At least Romney had enough sense not to stuff it in his collar like that one guy, instead choosing to simply grab on to the right end of a bill while smiling, devilishly. Oh, and then there’s some money falling out of his coat. Oops!

If this does not appear in an attack ad at some point in the next year, then various rival campaigns will have failed.

An old black and white photo

UPDATE: The first use of this image in media about Romney has been spotted in NY Mag:

Dubbed the worst moment of the debate:

Lets be clear here, Perry was out of line from the beginning. Perry supporters can take heart in the fact that he stayed awake for nearly half the debate, only lapsing into incoherency towards the end of the debate. Unfortunately, most of the time in this debate, while he wasn’t asleep, he looked anything but presidential. Shouting matches and downright rudeness characterized Perry’s performance. It looked anything but Presidential.

However, Romney’s response didn’t help. On one hand, he dispelled SNL Romney’s statement, “I”m incapable of rage,” with a response that included getting into Rick Perry’s personal space and putting his hand on Perry’s shoulder in a very agressive away.

For many Republican voters, the gumption of Romney might be appreciated except it was accompanied by whining about the debate rules and appealing to the moderator by name. “Anderson!” in a tone not too dissimilar from a child crying, “Mom, make him stop!”

Many folks at home saw what Sarah Palin saw. Her kids were fussing at each other during the debate and she had moments when she could tell the debate from her kids fighting each other and couldn’t tell which would make the most sense.

Much of the after-debate was about who won the debate. On the fine points of a college debating judge, the case can always be made for Newt Gingrich, with a nod to Michele Bachmann doing nicely. In reality, debates are about moments. When we look back at recent presidential debates, we don’t remember the debates on points, what stands out are those moments.

Philip Klein, senior editorial writer for The Washington Examiner, wrote a piece titled, Romney’s false health care claims echo Obama’s. Klein attacks a few sound bites Mitt Romney gave at the recent Fox/Google debate while trying to explain his 2006 MA health care bill. Unfortunately, Klein ignores the larger context of what Romney is saying, which Romney amply provides in his book, No Apology.

In his effort to make Romneycare and Obamacare seem alike, Klein doesn’t deny the differences between them. Moreover, he doesn’t even mention the differences. Romney didn’t cut Medicare/Medicaid, didn’t impose insurance price controls and didn’t do a host of other things Obama did in his 2,700 page bill. Romney’s bill is only 72 pages.

And as Marco Rubio pointed out in an interview for National Review during his 2010 campaign in which he obtained Romney’s endorsement, Romney’s plan didn’t raise taxes or add to the deficit, and is a state rather than federal plan.

“It’s a work in progress,” Rubio says, speaking of the Bay State program. “There are major distinctions between that and what Obama is trying to do in Washington. For one, it didn’t raise any taxes. Number two, it is not adding to our deficit. That is my biggest objection to Obamacare, although there are many others. My number-one objection to Obamacare is that we can’t afford it, even if it was the greatest idea in the world.”

“Florida and Massachusetts are very different places,” Rubio continues. “All I would say to you is that states were designed to be laboratories for creative thoughts and ideas. That’s what the Framers of our great republic intended. They wanted the states to be the places that came up with innovation and competition. And I’ll tell you what, if Massachusetts gets it wrong and Florida gets it right, people will move to Florida, and businesses will move to Florida, and vice versa. There are just major distinctions between what’s happening in Washington and what I hope states will do. Like I said, what I’m not in favor of is what Barack Obama has done, which is to raise taxes and add to the federal deficit in exchange of taking a step toward a single-payer system in America.”

Most importantly, Romney’s plan has slowed rising health care costs in MA, despite flawed studies claiming otherwise.

Klein cites a number of quotes from President Obama regarding his own health care plan, comparing them to selected statements from Romney, made during the debate. For our purposes, Obama’s statements are not relevant. Whether or not Obama is being truthful about his own plan has no bearing on the truth of Romney’s statements.

Rather than admitting that Romney’s 30 second debate answers are not intended for a hyper-technical audience the way his book is, Klein claims Romney is “consistently making a series of blatant lies.” That is a serious accusation, so let’s look at the first of Romney’s statements which Klein is referring to (from the official debate transcript):

ROMNEY: Let me tell you this about our system in Massachusetts: 92 percent of our people were insured before we put our plan in place. Nothing’s changed for them. The system is the same. They have private market-based insurance.

Admittedly, the second half of Mitt’s statement is not technically accurate unless taken in the context of the first sentence. Romney wasn’t saying their lives haven’t changed in any way at all, but was addressing the primary concern people have expressed to him, which is the mandate to own insurance. Mitt appears to be minimizing that particular concern by explaining that since most people in MA already had insurance, the new law was only telling them to do something they were already doing.

But Klein doesn’t see it that way:

Neither bill literally says that people have to drop their coverage, but both Obamacare … and Romneycare … effectively make people lose their current coverage. For one thing, both mandate that individuals purchase insurance, and once the government does that, it has to define what qualifies as “insurance.” Obamacare employs the phrase “minimum essential coverage,” where as in Romneycare, it’s called “minimum creditable coverage” (see Chapter 111M, section 1). In both cases, anybody who does not have a qualified insurance policy, therefore, has to obtain one that meets the government-imposed standards, or pay a fine.

The first fact to defeat Klein’s argument is that the coverage mandates are on insurance companies, not on policy holders. So his claim that people lost their coverage and had to switch is untrue.

The second problem with Klein’s argument is that he complains about “minimum essential coverage,” however states routinely “define what qualifies as ‘insurance.’” States regulate insurance just like they regulate other companies. Texas, for example, has mandated benefits for insurance coverage, which it applied universally as recently as 2004, at which point the state implemented “consumer choice plans” which do not contain all of the state mandated benefits but must be individually approved by the state. Regulations like “minimum essential coverage” were nothing new for MA. As Romney accurately said, “the system is the same.” Regulatory changes are inherent in that system.

Perhaps Klein is thinking of how the MA legislature expanded regulations further by mandating that “the division shall include within its covered services for adults all federally optional services that were included in its state plan or demonstration program in effect on January 1, 2002.” Romney vetoed this in the bill but the legislature overrode the veto. In his book, Romney explains, “I would reinstitute my vetoes of the legislature’s additions. Among these, one of the most significant is my conviction that the state should not mandate which benefits must be included in health insurance policies: Consumers should be free to choose which benefits they want” (PB, p. 194).

It’s hard to argue that someone supported something they vetoed. But Klein tries anyway, and in the process tips his hand about his lack of objectivity:

In the past, Romney’s tried to tout the fact that he vetoed some of the benefit mandates but was overridden by the legislature. That’s a disingenuous argument, because he spent years crafting the bill, signed it with a smiling Ted Kennedy at his side, touted it publicly, and issued symbolic vetoes knowing that they would be overridden, just to give him some conservative cover. This argument would be the equivalent of a Republican Senator having worked with Democrats for a year to pass Obamacare, voting it out of committee, giving it the 60 vote threshold it needed to break a filibuster, and then voting against final passage and trying to use that final meaningless vote to make a case to primary voters.

Contrary to Klein’s claims, the legislature in MA continued making changes to the bill throughout the entire process. His U.S. Senate analogy fails because Romney always opposed the provisions he vetoed and never did anything comparable to voting them out of a Senate committee. It would be more accurate to say the Senate sent the provisions in the first place knowing Governor Romney would not be able to stop them from overriding his vetoes (although in the case of two of the vetoes, the legislature was not able to garner enough votes to override).

Klein continues his analysis:

“Furthermore, both plans create incentives for businesses to drop employer-based private insurance and dump workers on the government exchanges. We’ve seen rumblings of this as Obamacare moves closer to implementation, and last year the Boston Globe reported the following news: ‘The relentlessly rising cost of health insurance is prompting some small Massachusetts companies to drop coverage for their workers and encourage them to sign up for state-subsidized care instead, a trend that, some analysts say, could eventually weigh heavily on the state’s already-stressed budget.’

“So, Romney’s claim in last night’s debate is just as dishonest as when Obama made the same claim to the American people two years ago.”

Romney never denied that our country is in an economic crisis. Small businesses are struggling and cutting wages and benefits. But the facts show that Romney’s health care plan has lowered the rate of cost increases.

And most importantly, Klein again neglects to crack open Romney’s book:

“When the reform was passed … we required everyone who received subsidized insurance to pay a fair share of their premiums–the new liberal administration decided that some people should get their insurance for nothing. Imagine the additional cost to the state of such a decision.” Romney further noted, “elections have consequences.” (PB, p. 194)

Now let’s look at Klein’s next example in the alleged “series of blatant lies”:

“ROMNEY: We had 8 percent of our people that weren’t insured. And so what we did is we said let’s find a way to get them insurance, again, market-based private insurance. We didn’t come up with some new government insurance plan.”

Indeed, the Massachusetts Connector is not an insurance plan. It just helps people find private insurance companies, and when necessary diverts medicaid funds for that purpose. Ronald Reagan proposed a plan to do something similar, with Medicare:

“The plan expands opportunities for Medicare beneficiaries to use their benefits to enroll in private health plans as an alternative to traditional Medicare coverage”

– Ronald Wilson Reagan, February 28, 1983, transmitting to Congress his Health Insurance Reform program

Now that we’ve heard from Reagan, let’s hear from Klein:

“It’s not clear if by “new government insurance plan,” Romney meant a “public option,” but either way, that’s moot, because the idea wasn’t a part of the final version of the national health care bill that Obama signed, either. Yet what both plans do have in common is a government-run health care exchange, in which individuals use government subsidies to purchase health insurance that meets requirements set by government-appointed officials.”

As we have already discussed, every state government sets requirements for private health insurance. If Klein is claiming that these constitute a “new government insurance plan,” he would have to apply that to the other states as well. Or perhaps he is claiming that medicaid is the “new government insurance plan,” but Romney didn’t create medicaid. It’s been around for a long time.

Now for the last of the alleged “blatant lies” cited by Klein:

“ROMNEY: Our plan in Massachusetts has some good parts, some bad parts, some things I’d change, some things I like about it. It’s different than Obamacare.”

Klein’s claim:

“Romney says there are some ‘bad parts,’ but won’t specify what they are.”

No. Klein just made that up. Klein is making the same mistake as our friends at RedState. And clearly Klein did not feel the need to do any real research before writing his attack. In his book, No Apology (PB), Romney explains some aspects which he once supported but no longer does, and has consistently opposed many aspects which were foisted upon the health care plan against his desires.

If Klein would actually learn more about Romney, he might like him.

Huckabee’s exclusive interview with the GOP presidential frontrunner might also make you want to take this review course: A Brief History of Why Huckabee and Romney Don’t Like Each Other – although I think it’s more accurate to say that Huckabee holds more of the fued. While Romney has defended Huckabee and spoke kindly of him since the 2007 primary campaign, Huckabee continued to do the opposite of Romney:

Long after the campaign ended with niether of the two winning the nomination, Huckabee dredged up old wounds in a November 2008 book. He wrote that he felt “total disrespect” when Romney didn’t call him after he won the Iowa caucuses and characterized Mitt as being “anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president.” He then panned Romney’s economic shtick by writing why don’t you let voters “eat stocks.”

Would Mitt Romney Be a Pro-Life President?

Mitt Romney on Obamacare vs. Romneycare

What Separates Romney from the Rest of the Pack?

Michael Barone notes the weak field of all the Republican candidates:

Generally speaking, our two parties have wanted to nominate candidates who have shown special strength among the voters who know them best. None of the nine candidates who participated in the Fox News/Google debate in Orlando has really done that. Rick Perry and Mitt Romney have won elections by margins comparable to those of John Cornyn and Paul Cellucci, competent officeholders but not on anyone’s list of presidential candidates. Ron Paul ran well ahead of his party base in 2010 against weak opposition; Michele Bachmann has not done so in three races against vigorous opponents. Newt Gingrich’s record of running ahead of party is spotty; Herman Cain’s is nonexistent.

Rick Santorum outperformed the Republican base in 1992 and 1994, but woefully underperformed it in 2006. Jon Huntsman and Gary Johnson won solid majorities for reelection against weak opposition.

None of them has performed, at least recently, as Chris Christie did when he was defeated an incumbent governor by a 48%-45% margin in New Jersey in 2009, a year after it had voted 57%-42% for Barack Obama, or Mitch Daniels, who was reelected over a former member of Congress by a 58%-40% margin in Indiana on the same day the state voted 50%-49% for Barack Obama, or Paul Ryan, who has been reelected with between 63% and 68% of the vote between 2000 and 2010 in a district which voted Democratic for president by 49%-47% in 2000, 54%-46% in 2004 and 51%-47% in 2008. These are Republicans who have shown the capacity to overperform the party’s generic base.

The problem Mitt Romney faces is that explaining conservatism to “conservatives” is not like chess. In chess, there’s an objective measure. Most folks are unable to absorb (and thus appreciate) sophisticated analysis. In chess, it doesn’t matter if others are able to see your strength. You just hit an opponent with a checkmate and others are left wondering afterwards what happened – because even though they don’t understand the nuances of “how” you did it, they can at least understand “that” you did it.

But when it comes to explaining principles, there is no clear objective standard for people to follow. Sometimes this can be overcome through sheer explanation, but too many loud, lazy voices with agendas are eager to interfere. So, Mitt is like a Kasparov with a long record of impressive wins, but his antagonists spread confusion – ie “This sixth grader has won more games than Kasparov, so he’s better than Kasparov” or “Kasparov claims to be good at chess, but he completely gave up his queen, he traded it for a pawn! He doesn’t even know that a queen is worth more than a pawn!” And people buy this stuff.

Still, Romney keeps trying to explain it to them – because he cares about our future. That’s why Romney kept hammering the social security issue. It wasn’t for cheap political points, it was because he did not want the GOP nominee to have such a liability in a general election. That’s the same reason he dropped out in 2008. The entire establishment wanted him to keep going – including Santorum, Bachmann, Rush, Levin, Hannity, you name it. He was introduced by Laura Ingraham. He could have kept going. But he knew the options were to either let McCain be the nominee, or pursue a course that could lead to a brokered convention and leave the ultimate nominee with a huge liability that would be difficult to overcome. He sacrificed his own chances for the greater good:

Notice his wife at the end. This was a difficult decision, a sincere decision. And Romney was right about his primary reason, Obama’s foreign policy. Just look at the chaos Obama has created in the Middle East. Iran is closer than ever to acquiring nuclear weapons, the Palestinians believe Obama promised them their own state, unnecessary problems with Turkey, attacked Libya, and apologized to the whole Middle East for America’s alleged crimes.