Free Republic

He’s politically dumb and his campaign is run by amateurs. He doesn’t have a message and doesn’t know how to deliver a message. He’s a political letdown running on autopilot who needs to grab the controls. He’s a man whom only friends, relatives and fellow Mormons will ever love. And his name is Mitt Romney, Republican candidate for President of the United States. These are stinging jabs. All were made in the past week and all share one surprising thing in common: they were delivered not from the Obama campaign’s Chicago attack machine, as you might expect, but in a...

Mitt Romney's presidential campaign broke with congressional Republicans on Monday by arguing that the individual mandate upheld by the Supreme Court last week is a penalty, not a tax. http://thehill.com/video/campaign/235855-romney-team-agrees-with-obama-mandate-not-a-tax Duck duck who's got the Duck ?

An article by Michael O'Brien on MSNBC's First Read this morning quotes an "informal" advisor to Mitt Romney's campaign as saying that the presidential candidate is not likely to choose a woman as his running mate because Sarah Palin "poisoned the well" for women, with the possible exception of New Hampshire freshman Sen. Kelly Ayotte.

PHILADELPHIA -- Mitt Romney's aides soft-pedaled his latest tax pronouncements on Monday, insisting he wasn't tipping his hand when he told donors privately that he might seek to end the tax break for mortgages on second homes and curb other deductions for the wealthy as part of tax reform. "He was just discussing ideas that came up on the campaign trail," said former Sen. Jim Talent of Missouri, a frequent campaign surrogate. The remarks, made at a closed-door fundraiser in Florida and overheard by reporters, did not mark any "change in policy," Talent said on a conference call with reporters....

Mitt Romney, whose liberal past and questionable conservative credentials are at the heart of his problems securing the Republican presidential nomination, is being supported by three prior Republican nominees--all of whom lost their bids for the presidency while running as moderates.Sen. John McCain, the 2008 nominee who lost to Barack Obama, endorsed Romney on January 4 heading into the New Hampshire primary.Former Sen. Bob Dole, the 1996 nomineee who lost to Bill Clinton, endorsed Romney in December before the Iowa caucus.Former President George H.W. Bush, who lost to Bill Clinton in 1992, 'unofficially' endorsed Romney in December in remarks to...

Mitt Romney was firm and direct with the abortion rights advocates sitting in his office nine years ago, assuring the group that if elected Massachusetts governor, he would protect the state’s abortion laws. Then, as the meeting drew to a close, the businessman offered an intriguing suggestion — that he would rise to national prominence in the Republican Party as a victor in a liberal state and could use his influence to soften the GOP’s hard-line opposition to abortion. He would be a “good voice in the party” for their cause, and his moderation on the issue would be “widely...

The New Hampshire Primary is a must win for hometown Mitt Romney, but the sudden surge of Herman Cain has now put a threat to Romney’s huge lead in New Hampshire. In a recent Insider Advantage poll Herman Cain rose to 24% while Romney has fallen to 39%. Romney has been as high as 45% in previous polls. Romney has been slipping in recent New Hampshire polls, some believe due to his pressure to move the Nevada Caucus ahead of the New Hampshire Primary. mitt-romney-town-hall-new-hampshire A win for Herman Cain in Iowa could give him the momentum to make the...

After watching the GOP presidential debate the other night, it was hard to avoid this conclusion: Mitt Romney looks more and more like the GOP presidential nominee. He's the best debater. He's got his issues and his rejoinders down pat. He brushes away his opponents like lint on his lapel. And all with such ease. That said, there's a teensy problem he just can't seem to beat: Conservatives don't like him. Or trust him. Or really want him to be the GOP nominee. Sure, you say, Republicans never like their nominees, and they still manage to vote for them. There...

(snip) Romney, supplanted as the GOP front-runner by Perry, has defended a federal program, and said Perry’s comments will be exploited by the Democrats in a general election campaign. “This election is about choices and voters – and voters will have the opportunity to choose between Mitt Romney, who wants to fix and strengthen Social Security for the next generation, and Rick Perry, who wants to dismantle it,” Romney communications director Gail Gitcho said in a statement. (snip)

Former Bay State governor Mitt Romney supports Speaker John Boehner as House Republicans move forward. His campaign says that he is reviewing the Boehner plan. "Governor Romney thinks President Obama's leadership has been an historic failure. He applauds Speaker Boehner for standing firm against raising taxes when our nation can least afford them," says Andrea Saul, a spokeswoman for Romney, in a statement to National Review Online.

DERRY, N.H. — Mitt Romney says he can appeal to Tea Partiers, even though activists and groups aligned with the movement are stressing that they need to defeat him in 2012. “I think I line up pretty well with the Tea Party,” he said in response to a question from The Daily Caller after touring the Derry Feed and Supply store. “They want to see smaller government. So do I.” But not everyone associated with the movement see Romney as one of them. Joe Miller, a former U.S. Senate candidate in Alaska and a Tea Party darling, is now running...

He’s a flip-flopper who can seem disconnected from average citizens, and wears health care reform as a political albatross around his neck. That’s the standard line of attack against Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney. But, the same critique could also apply to President Obama. That means if Romney gets past GOP doubters and wins his party’s nomination, the 2012 election could be a head-to-head between two men with similar vulnerabilities. On the surface, they have little in common. Romney and Obama represent dramatically different backgrounds and cultivate vastly different political images. But they share some interesting traits. With or without...

TUESDAY UPDATE: TWEAKING MITT. With Mitt Romney set to formally announce his presidential candidacy on Thursday in Stratham, the state Democratic Party is ramping up its attacks on the former Massachusetts governor. Later today, the party will announce the availability of “Two Sides of Mitt Romney” t-shirts on its web site. The front of the shirt says: “Mitt Romney: pro-health care reform; pro-individual mandate; pro-Recovery Act; pro-immigration reform; pro-cap and trade; pro-gay rights.” On the back of the shirt, the same issues are listed but with an “anti-” prefix before each one. The party lists several news reports from this...

The Mama Grizzly is coming out of hibernation. This weekend, Sarah Palin is launching her "One Nation" bus tour, visiting historical sites across the country. Palin will start on Memorial Day at the Rolling Thunder weekend motorcycle rally that starts at the Pentagon. Where it will end has yet to be announced. But given Palin's other recent move—the announcement of a feature-length film on her tenure as governor—it looks as if her ultimate destination may be the White House. Whatever Mitt Romney had on his plate for Memorial Day, he'd better make room. If we assume—for the purposes of page...

As we all know, Mitt Romney's biggest problem in the 2012 Republican primaries is that conservatives don't trust him, given that he used to be a pro-choice moderate who got health coverage for Massachusetts' uninsured. His answer to this problem has been to run frantically to the right, staking out the most extreme position he can on any issue that comes up (his latest is an attack on lazy unemployed people). But the truth is this strategy is going to fail. What Mitt needs to understand is that voters don't make judgments based on checklists. If a true-blue conservative wants...

Al Gore, on his website, flags this passage in Mitt Romney’s recent book No Apology: “I believe that climate change is occurring — the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.” Gore writes: “We can have disagreements about the solutions to this crisis, but we need to acknowledge fundamental truths. The science proving the existence of the climate crisis is not in question. That is where our debates about policy need to begin.” Romney, a potential 2012 GOP presidential candidate, and Gore certainly disagree on...

Daniel Larison catches Mitt Romney trying to have it both ways on the $700 billion bank bailout: Romney says he was for Henry Paulson's good TARP but he's against Tim Geithner's bad TARP. Conveniently, this allows Romney to position himself as effectively anti-TARP under Obama while he was a supporter under Bush. Larison correctly argues, "One can either recognize that the original TARP was always potentially an opaque slush fund to be used for whatever purpose the executive branch wanted, and it was therefore an outrageous measure that ought to have been defeated, or one can accept the abuses of...

Cape Cod, Mass.My husband retired from IBM about a decade ago, and as we aren't old enough for Medicare we still buy our health insurance through the company. But IBM, with its typical courtesy, informed us recently that we will be fined by the state. Why? Because Massachusetts requires every resident to have health insurance, and this year, without informing us directly, the state had changed the rules in a way that made our bare-bones policy no longer acceptable. Unless we ponied up for a pricier policy we neither need nor want—or enrolled in a government-sponsored insurance plan—we would have...