All goes wrong for Dudley Do-Right
By Howie Carr | Sunday, January 22, 2012 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
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Photo by Nancy Lane
Mitt Romney just can’t close the deal.
Twelve days ago, Mitt was the toast of the GOP. This morning he’s just toast.
Twelve days ago, he’d won a “historic” two in a row — Iowa and New Hampshire — and he had a double-digit lead in South Carolina.
Now it turns out Mitt didn’t even win Iowa.
Mitt had the governor of South Carolina with him, but Newt Gingrich had the two real power brokers — Juan Williams of Fox News and, more importantly, John King of CNN. Those were his foils in the two South Carolina debates.
Two minutes into the two-hour Thursday night debate on CNN, Gingrich had won the primary. And the reporter who threw Newt the hanging curve, John King, is from Massachusetts. That’s the kind of week it’s been for Mitt.
On the message boards, they’re calling him “Mittens” again, or “Myth.”
A little more than a week ago, there were rumors that Gingrich might pull out of the fight and throw his support behind Rick Santorum. A few days later, Newt was demanding that Santorum get out.
Mitt’s still got an 18-point lead in Florida, or did before last night’s Newt landslide. But he’s got to learn to lie better in these debates. That lame story of his about why he didn’t run for re-election in Massachusetts in 2006 was bad enough, but on the question of releasing his income tax returns, he squirmed like a gaffed fish. He was drowning in flop sweat.
Why is Mitt ashamed of having a lot of money? If Newt, the born-again Catholic, can brush off his cheating past, how come Mitt can’t explain coherently why it’s OK to pay a 15 percent capital gains rate on money you’ve already paid the top 35 percent income tax rate on when you first earned it?
This is Mitt’s problem: He comes across in these debates as a wimp. Dudley Do-Right didn’t play in South Carolina. He’s afraid of his own shadow. He’s overtrained.
The Republican primary voters have this dream of a snarling Newt disemboweling Barack Obama in the debates this fall. Talk about myths. How many debates is Barack going to agree to? Two maybe, tops, and both of them will be MSNBC-style — “Mr. Gingrich, when did you stop beating your first ex-wife?” Follow-up: “When you did you stop beating your second ex-wife?”
To the “Jersey Shore” MTV crowd, Newt would come across as a fat, nasty, pasty old man. They’re not going to realize what a boob Barack is, because they’re boobs, too.
Mitt Romney began this campaign season with a career electoral record of 5-17. This morning, he sports a not-so-gaudy 6-19 mark. I guess running Bain was a lot easier than running a national campaign.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists//view.bg?articleid=1397834
Howie misses the big point about how Newt can throw the medias BS right back at them. He will debate Obama whether he is there or not. He will not be afraid to call him out unlike John McCain for example.
Howie now runs with the establishment blue-bloods.
His radio show is almost impossible to listen to the past few weeks since he, the Colonel, and Sandy are all Mitt, all the time. And they trash any other Repub in the field.
Howie has jumped the shark with this Primary season.
from Red Mass Group: Tim Murray, the other shoe drops
http://www.redmassgroup.com/diary/13811/tim-murray-there-goes-the-other-shoe
>>Been hearing rumors for a while that multiple Globe reporters were still chasing the Tim Murray/Mike McLaughlin/Late Night Car Crash Story. This morning, the other shoe drops hard. Here is the worst of it:
(QUOTES GLOBE)
-—To hear Lieutenant Governor Timothy P. Murray tell it, former Chelsea housing chief Michael E. McLaughlin was just a campaign volunteer. Though phone records show that the two men called each other 193 times over the past two years - including one call on a Sunday at 1:30 a.m. - Murray aides insist that McLaughlin played no special role.
But a Globe investigation shows that the former Chelsea housing chief ran an extensive political operation for the lieutenant governor right up until McLaughlin resigned in November amid an uproar over his $360,000 salary. The FBI is investigating whether McLaughlin broke federal laws, questioning housing authority employees about McLaughlin’s political activities and management of the agency.
Murray “felt betrayed. He felt played’’ by McLaughlin, explained one person close to the lieutenant governor. Restless, Murray went out for an early-morning drive to clear his head.
The drive ended abruptly at 5:26 a.m. when his state-owned Crown Victoria slammed into a rock ledge along Interstate 190 at a speed in excess of 90 miles per hour, rolling over twice and triggering the political crisis of his career. Murray’s shifting accounts of how he came to be driving so early in the morning and why he crashed have raised so many questions that he recently hired Ferson, a crisis communications specialist, to handle the fall-out.
http://www.criticalmassachusetts.com/2012/01/tim-murray-there-goes-other-shoe.html
I question if Howie Carr should, even, be a part of FR anymore. Howie and company (Sandy, COL. Hunt, Avi) have been pro-Mitt Romney for awhile, and it’s not fair to kick out members of FR who are pro-Mitt, while not doing the same thing to Ann Coulter and Howie Carr, too. Right?