If the Republican electorate wanted this kind of self-dramatizing nonsense, why bother with uptight, buttoned-down Mitt? They could’ve gone with the puffed-up birthday clown who just endorsed him: The Donald.That was my first thought when I heard the Romney camp including Mitt Romney had jettisoned the debate coach O'Donnell they had brought on board after the disastrous South Carolina debates. Romney improves his debate style in Florida but wants all the credit instead of giving any to the new debate coach. Romney has to be the most thin skinned candidates ever and unwilling to give credit to anyone. Why would we want someone like that to be President? Will say this for The Donald -- at least he comes across as someone who likes to laugh and joke around. Romney comes across as a stiff.
Can you see Romney going to the Army/Navy game as the Commander in Chief or how about a basketball pick-up basketball game or playing baseball with the kids on the White House lawn like President George W. Bush? Personally think that Obama playing pick-up basketball is great. How about Gerald Ford and his golf game? It was good for laughs. Clinton loved Arkansas basketball. President Reagan was a sports broadcaster starting out. John F Kennedy loved touch football and the list goes on of where sports played a role in the lives of our Presidents.
Not with Romney -- most people who have worked with him, don't feel they know him at all. It is just odd how unlikable he can be in a crowd of regular people as he doesn't know how to work a room and probably why he has had trouble getting elected. Without taking full credit for the Olympics, he probably would not have been elected Governor of Massachusetts. How much of the Olympics was Romney involved hands on versus taking the credit of others? He still cannot get over 50% of the vote even in the state of Nevada which is heavily Mormon. In fact less than 25,000 people voted and that is supposed to make Romney a done deal?
Establishment blew it this time starting with allowing the states to move up the primaries because the RNC Chair and the Committee have no backbone. They should have told Florida to take a hike when they moved up the primary and taken the Convention elsewhere. Since it wasn't very far along, it would have made no difference. Any state voting before 1 April according to the rules is to award delegates proportionately but the RNC is refusing to make Florida do just that. Why? The rest of the states have to follow the rules but not Florida? I am not a Gingrich supporter, but he is right to take this to Convention on Florida because the RNC set the rules but now won't enforce them. More of the behind the scenes shenanigans of the RNC to get Romney the nomination.
Cutting lose the new debate coach who helped in win the Florida debates because he wants full credit shows a side to Romney that should make voters pause. Would he would put people around him that were 'yes' people because he wants all the spotlight on him with all the credit? It also shows that he wouldn't be afraid to fire someone good because they got better publicity. Not good traits in a President.
Does this also mean he will choose a VP candidate that we have never heard about so they won't outshine him on stage. Anyone who is a people person will outshine Romney who acts like a stiff as someone said in his Brooks Brothers shirts. He is very uncomfortable around most Americans and doesn't know how to talk with them one on one. Must be the reason the Town Halls have gone out the window because they showcase how uncomfortable Romney is around regular people.
Has the Republican leadership lost their collective minds to push Romney on the Republican Party all because they think he can beat Obama. The man has no core values or if he does they are liberal because he is not comfortable talking about conservative values. Conservatives who have defended Romney for whatever purpose are turning into pretzels with their defense. If it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable. In fact this primary is so bad and obnoxious that you have to sit back and laugh sometimes or you go nuts.
Bottom line is that all those conservatives supporting him because he has the best chance to beat Obama haven't taken a very close look at Mitt Romney the person who doesn't seem to be comfortable with himself. This episode with the debate coach is underscoring a very arrogant man who has to have the attention. We have one of those in the White House and don't need another one.
Romney Cuts Loose O'Donnell, Perhaps Out of Ego
The GOP frontrunner apparently cut loose the man who whipped his debate skills into shape out of fear that he was being overshadowed. Michelle Cottle on how ego trumped strategy.
Not that anyone doubted Romney would win Nevada, what with the state’s sizable Mormon contingent and his boffo showing there in 2008. Even so, the governor’s team must be feeling pretty good with another win under its belt, especially as the heretofore frenetic cage match enters a bit of a lull. Between now and the 10-state Super Tuesday voting extravaganza on March 6, Romney faces only a couple of friendly primaries, one debate, and next week’s CPAC conference.
During this period of relative clam, the once-again-frontrunning governor would do well to slow his hamster wheel, take a deep breath, and think hard about how not to screw things up with unforced errors stemming from what everyone outside his immediate family recognizes as Mitt’s lack of comfort in his own skin. You know: the kind of stumbling about that leads Mittens to blithely announce that he doesn’t give a crap about poor people.
This is not to suggest that Romney should aspire to megalomania of Newtonian proportions. (God forbid!) It would be nice, however, if the governor could work through some of the core insecurities that seem to have led him this week to cut loose debate adviser Brett O’Donnell, reportedly out of fear that O’Donnell was stealing the candidate’s thunder.
For those not obsessively following Romneyworld, O’Donnell is the former Michele Bachmann aide who, in the wake of the congresswoman’s departure, has been unofficially advising Mitt. A former debate coach for the Jerry Falwell–founded Liberty University (one of the nation’s collegiate-debating powerhouses), O’Donnell was seen as a driving force behind the governor’s transformation in the Florida debates from Gingrich whipping boy to red-hot alpha male.
Alas, instead of winning O’Donnell a formal spot in Romneyworld, his flattering media mentions earned the veteran operative a swift kick in the crotch. As Politico reported Saturday, not one, not two, but three Romney staffers called up O’Donnell post-debate to gripe that he was getting too much attention. In response to a New York Times online article that praised O’Donnell too much for Team Romney’s taste, chief strategist Stuart Stevens instructed O’Donnell to call the reporter and ask that his role be downplayed in the subsequent print version of the story.
Not that O’Donnell was the only source of agita inside Romneyworld. Of the fallout from the Times’s article, Politico noted:
The piece, said one campaign insider, made the candidate himself “seem like an afterthought in reviving his own campaign.” The campaign held a conference call this week, multiple sources said, in which a clear message was delivered—Romney pulled himself back from the brink after South Carolina, and no one else did it for him.On Monday, the candidate himself got snippy when Today’s Matt Lauer asked about the article:
“I think you can expect advisers to think that the work of advisers is very, very important, but frankly, I think if you’re to go back and look at where the sentiment changed, it was with the debates.”
Translation: Screw you, Matt! I didn’t need no stinking help taking down that Georgia dough boy.
Now, I can see a certain logic to Romney’s getting all chest-thumpy about this. For a guy considered limp and ineffectual throughout much of this race, getting a little feisty could even be considered smart strategy.
By contrast, what looks like a much worse strategy: casting off O’Donnell.
Assuming that the adviser indeed played a significant role in helping Romney find his groove, the campaign should have held on to him so tightly that his circulatory system was compromised. If they thought he was talking out of school to reporters—and here it should be noted that O’Donnell does not have a reputation as a self-promoter—then they should’ve dealt with that problem separately: yelled at him, banned him from speaking to the media, taken away his iPhones.
Jerk the guy into line, but for God’s sake don’t let him take his talent elsewhere! How many times have we heard variations on the theme: part of being a great leader is surrounding yourself with the best people available?
With presidential combatants, a fat ego comes with the territory. What you don’t want is a candidate whose ego is so delicate that it can’t stand the indignity of anyone else getting any credit. That sort of thinking prompts leaders to surround themselves with people whose chief qualification is that they won’t overshadow the principle. Next stop, mediocrity.
Maybe there’s more to this O’Donnell affair than meets the eye. Maybe the guy was, in fact, delivering really bad advice. Or alienating the rest of the staff with his obnoxious manner or noxious body odor. Maybe he was caught groping a campaign intern or telling anti-Mormon jokes in the spin room.
I kinda hope so. Because the thought of the guy who saved Romney’s debate bacon getting kicked to the curb because he bruised the candidate’s fragile sense of self is depressing—and a potentially disturbing sign of future turmoil.
Excerpt: Read More at The Daily Beast
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