(via Greg Sargent)
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I {heart} DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. From Benjy Sarlin at TPM:
… “I would not put the cart before the horse and define [Romney] as an unambiguous frontrunner,” DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz told TPM in an interview at St. Anselm College in Manchester. “He’s coming off what at some point probably won’t even be defined as a win in Iowa where fewer voters came out for him than came out in 2008.” She added that anything less than 50% in New Hampshire should be interpreted as a sign of weakness given his close ties to the state.
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Nonetheless, as polls show Romney threatening to secure the nomination early, Democrats are unveiling new campaigns to try to define his business experience as more Gorden Gekko than Steve Jobs. Party officials have been holding press events in Iowa and New Hampshire with Randy Johnson, a worker who was laid off from his job at American Pad and Paper under Bain Capital’s management in the 1990s, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that Bain’s layoffs under Mitt Romney will be a critical part of their general election strategy should he win the nomination. Romney says that his opponents are cherry-picking his failures and ignoring success stories like Staples, but his campaign has been unable to substantiate its claims that he created net jobs and critics note that even some of Bain’s failures ended up creating a profit for Romney and his fellow investors through consulting fees and dividends.
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“Mitt Romney, I think, is more of a job cremator than a job creator,” Schultz said. She added: “He was a corporate buyout specialist at Bain Capital. He dismantled companies. He cut jobs. He forced companies into bankruptcy and he outsourced jobs and sent jobs overseas. That’s not a record to write home about, that’s not a record to be proud of, and it’s something voters need to know.”
amk
DWS is so much better than tim kaine. The lady has got spunk.
Hill Dweller
Chris Wallace, purported journalist, was literally telling DWS that Baine laying off people was the same thing as Solyndra going bankrupt.
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
I have no way of knowing whether she does it for a living or not, but if I were a candidate for anything, I’d want to hire B-J poster extraordinaire Jennifer for all my political ads. Take this excerpt from one post of hers I saved from July 24, 2010 (and imagine this message superimposed over a bunch of cigar-smoking fat cats with trophy wives flitting about in a rich setting):
This is just one example. When it comes to messaging, Jennifer is one of those posters I pay attention to.
ETA: Wish some other people would, if they’re not already.
Katie5
They’d better find a better phrase than “job cremator,” which is too cute by half.
MikeJ
@Katie5: I think it’s pretty good. The best thing about it is that everyone who hears it will hear it again any time any one say “job creator”.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
Mitt Romney is pressing the delete button on his own record, in the same way that he pressed the delete button on the jobs of hard-working Americans when he destroyed their companies so he could build himself another mansion. Is Mitt Romney a man you want to trust with the delete button at three o’clock in the morning?
Katie5
@MikeJ: I don’t believe in buying the framing of the opposition. I prefer phrases related to the Gekko era, like corporate takeovers, chainsaw Sam, stripping (pillaging?) the company, stealing the assets. Or just “Romney made his money by bankrupting companies.”
On a related note, I can’t remember any of the media saying that all the companies Romney is credited with creating jobs (Staples, Dominoes, Sports Authority) are in low wage service sector and the companies that many of the companies he bankrupted were relatively high paying manufacturing jobs.
clayton
You all should just stick to comics and football. Less blowback and less nonsense in the comments.
Yes, I noticed that there is now a “clay” in the comments. A sledgehammer would have been more subtle.
Ira-NY
TPM is reporting Newt is making a $5 million ad buy in South Carolina.
The trailer for the ad is here.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/01/the_boffo_awfulness.php?ref=fpblg
MikeJ
@Katie5: You can’t stop them from saying what they will say. The best you can hope for is to make people ill when they hear it.
amk
romney, the raider.
J Edgar
@Katie5:
“Layoff Artist” gets a lot of Google hits.
Katie5
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: Release the tax records. Otherwise we don’t know if he’s foreign (Caymen Islands)* or not.
(Probably not. I believe he was part of the Caymen Islands repatriation efforts by the feds.)
Hill Dweller
@Katie5: The companies Willard cite “created” those jobs long after he left Bain; and Bain wasn’t the only investor.
It is a completely bogus figure that he nor his campaign can back up with hard numbers.
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
@Katie5:
Can we only have one phrase we can use this cycle?
BGinCHI
So many reasons to hate Mitt Romney. The only people who really seem to like him are the clones whose last name is also Romney.
His record sucks and he isn’t charismatic. He’s really lucky there has been so much attention elsewhere, cuz when it fully lands on him if he wins the nomination, he’s going to make John Kerry look like John Travolta.
Phil Perspective
@Ira-NY: Yeah, backed by Sheldon Adelson and his money. And Adelson is the type who uses $100 bills to light his cigars, if he smokes them. So this is going to get interesting. I guess Newt really meant it when he said he’s gonna get medieval on Romney’s ass.
Phil Perspective
@amk: She might be, but how many Progressives has she recruited to run for Congress? And how many is she trying to undermine? Her record as head of the DCCC was very crappy, remember.
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
@Phil Perspective:
We need some file footage of him for Jennifer’s ad above. Or someone who looks very much like him, along with whoever the Koch brothers use as their body doubles.
amk
@BGinCHI: How are the junior and mom doing ? Got that name thingy licked yet ?
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy):
Mitt Romney isn’t a Soc.ialist, just a sociopath. Mitt Romney’s Great Leap Forward was fuelled by a 10 million dollar bailout for his failed start-up company – Bain. Mitt Romney made 250 million dollars destroying parts of the American economy – but he’ll never admit that his big bucks were all because of a big government intervention by his Washington cronies. Mitt Romney cost taxpayers millions of dollars and tens of thousands of jobs. Just think what he could do for us when he gets his hands on a trillion dollar bail-out budget. Mitt Romney loves to gamble with your money. The question is: do you feel lucky?
BGinCHI
@amk: They are doing really well. Thanks for asking.
I announced the name later in the thread: Xavier Ray. AKA “Xavi.”
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: Hell, that post right there would make a damn good 45-second spot. This shit ain’t hard, y’all.
I mean, if we can do it as well as Newt Fucking Gingrich we’ll be in good shape, will we not?
MikeJ
Finally got around to watching today’s Sherlock. Did they throw in the dogging scene just for Mitt?
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy):
If a simple peasant like MARP here can do it…..
Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy)
@MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson: Aw, didn’t mean it that way, promise.
MildlyAmusedRainbowPerson
@Evolving Deep Southerner (tense changed for accuracy):
Eh, just a bit of self-mockery to keep me honest. No harm, no foul.
mak
@Katie5: I really like the “Citizen of the Cayman Islands” angle, and think that could have some real net legs, but in the meantime am perfectly okay with “Job Cremator,” as well as “the guy who laid off your dad” and “dickbag with a crease in his jeans and, likely, his magic undies.” In other words, I’m good with leveling any and all insults so that, as we saw with Sister Sarah, aka Caribou Barbie and Bible Spice, Mittens is reduced in the public eye to a cartoonish character unfit for the Presidnetsy.
amk
@BGinCHI: Cool name. Are you a soccer fan ?
Katie5
@mak: Like Citizen of the Caymen Islands. How about “gives a bad name to douche”?
Problem is, lots of people respect douches. Bullies and other sociopaths as well. Irony is, Romney rings phony with everything he is, except that I can see him as a Mormon Bishop.
Stan of the Sawgrass
Sorry, I’m at work in my studio (ex-garage) and I’ll have to check all this in the A.M.– but did anyone note the Nickky Kristoff thing in the NYT saying “Don’t worry, Mitty’s really a sane kompashinett moderate, let’s just ignore the right-wing nutjobbery, kuz he really doesn’t mean it.” I’m having a flashback to Joe Klein’s piece about W. in ’98 or so– one of those bad trip things.
Sorry if I missed anyone’s earlier comment about this– working late and just wanted to check in with y’all. Great thread, great comments. Catch the rest of the thread after 4am.
Kane
It wasn’t until 1978 that the Mormon church decided to allow blacks to fully participate in church rites. Mitt Romney was 31 years old at the time, which means that he had spent nearly half of his life in an organization that excluded blacks from full participation.
By all means continue to ask Ron Paul about his newsletters. By all means continue to ask Rick Perry about his hunting camp. By all means hold Newt Gingrich and Rick Sanntorum accountable for their repeated dog whistles. But if we are going to hold these candidates to a certain level of standards, shouldn’t Romney also be held to those same standards?
mak
“The Mormon Bishop” works too. As does Mitt the Shit (a Massachusetts fave), Mittens (a little tired, but still), the Gambler (a tad esoteric), Willard, Elder Romney, Mex (a nickname his father, George, endured as a Mexican immigrant) or, my personal favorite, “Man-on-Dog, Dog-on-Car” (a mash-up with Santorum (which, according to Bob Kerry, is Latin for asshole), that I’m pretty sure I saw on BJ earlier today).
some guy
Little Debbie has been very successful at getting Republicans elected in South Florida. Ileana and the despicable Brothers, all 3 owe their fealty to the bullshit Little Debbie spun to help the GOP maintain control of South Florida while Sparkly Pony Princess ran the DCCC.
feh@!
some guy
Sheldon Adelson and his money.
Little Debbie has her own StupidPac ready to roll. supposedly.
Stan of the Sawgrass
@some guy: Hmm… ‘troll’, or ‘Skunk Ape?’ If you know enough to know who Illy and her bro’s are, you ought to know how long they’ve been around, which is way, way before Deb. She ‘helped the GOP maintain control’ by being a noisy Dem bitch, I suppose.
F’kin carpet/firebagger. Hard enough to be a Dem down here without ‘friends’ like you.
Sorry, got no ‘Skunk Ape’ food. Ignore him, please.
Linda Featheringill
@Ira-NY:
“Their suffering began when Mitt Romney came to town”?
Hee-hee. That is funny. Maybe a tad melodramatic, but funny. Wonder how long the whole thing is?
slightly-peeved
Hey folks, here’s the story of Mittie the Moocher
He’d buy your factory, strip it bare, then he’d boot ya
Sell the company overseas for all he could make
now he’ll do it to the country – so vote no, for Pete’s sake!
kdaug
Let us also not forget that Willard “Richie-Rich” is also the son of George, previous Governor of Massachusetts.
Not that there’s anything wrong with inherited wealth or status…
Chuck Butcher
@kdaug:
That would be Michigan
kdaug
@Chuck Butcher: Stand corrected.
AxelFoley
@Stan of the Sawgrass:
LOL, looks like
somebodyI mean, some guy, got owned.debbie
It’s probably been noted here before, but I just heard a couple of sound bites from Romney from the debates, to the effect that he knew what it was like to be worried that he wasn’t going to be able to make his payroll and that there had been a couple of times that he was afraid he was going to get a pink slip (“Please, Daddy, I won’t do it again.”).
burnspbesq
Speaking of job cremation …
We finally know why three important income tax treaties (a new treaty with Hungary and protocols to existing treaties with Switzerland and Luxembourg) haven’t gotten floor votes in the Senate, after being favorably reported out of the Foreign Relations Committee months ago.
Rand Paul put a secret hold on them. Seems he is philosophically opposed to the very idea of the IRS sharing information with tax authorities in other countries, even though (or perhaps because) information exchange is critical to combating cross-border tax scams.
There are other reasons why tax treaties are important, but this one is sufficient for me to want to shove an electric cattle prod up Paul’s … nose.
Gunning, McConnell, and now Paul. How does Kentucky keep coming up with these people?
Applejinx
I like ‘cremator’ because it doesn’t sound like some swashbuckling wicked destroyer- it sounds like a mortician, and Romney looks and talks and acts like a mortician, so it’s perfect. Job cremator it is.
Don’t forget that ‘devastating savage job destroyer’ sounds good to a lot of silly people who vote on the basis of manliness. Don’t do ANY of the Republican’s work for them as far as making messaging about Mitt being the tough conqueror of anything much.
He’s the faceless cog that got you fired, not ‘corporate raider’, he’s the smiling creepy mortician, the job cremator. There’s nothing macho about him. Dubya, much less the scary Cheney, far out-machos Mitt.
burnspbesq
@Katie5:
“Release the tax records”
Neither possible nor wise. The same laws that protect your 1040s from public disclosure (Internal Revenue Code Section 6103 and Section 552(b)(3) of the Freedom of Information Act) protects Romney’s. You can and should continue to press him to release them, and if he chooses not to you can and should beat on him about it, but if he chooses not to you are SOL.
Pat In Massachusetts
I believe it was a Democratic president who signed NAFTA. And here we are some ten years or so later….a country with no jobs.
I think it’s fair to say that both sides do it or DID it when it comes to destroying the lives of American workers.
Schlemizel
@Stan of the Sawgrass:
Its a dim memory now but I do remember something about her endorsing a Republican candidate for Congress against a Dem sometime in the early 00s. Anger at that would hardly be firebagger territory.
I have seen her on the talking heads & she ran hot and cold as far as I could tell. But those are just impressions, I don’t know much about her record.
waldo
Mitt: Job Cremator — Just 16 characters. Cool. You could read that bumper sticker from 6 car-lengths back.
Karen S.
@Kane:
I seem to recall that the reason the ban was lifted was because of some weirdness about the LDS head prophet (or whatever the head of the LDS church is called) at the time claiming to have been told by God to do so. Of course, it couldn’t have been due to all the bad publicity the church was getting about its backwards policy against blacks, specifically black men, from fully participating in the church. No, not all.
Schlemizel
@burnspbesq:
Not sure I get your point. Because the law protects a private citizens privacy we should never demand financial transparency from candidates for public office.
“Since your felony records are sealed we shouldn’t demand that candidates running for President reveal their criminal past”?
Willard’s folks are going to have to find a better line of BS than that, particularly as the ‘jobs Cremator” tag sticks.
Dude in Princeton
@Phil Perspective: When Netanyahu comes to town, DWS and Adelson are best buddies. And that’s the price of having DWS run the DCCC. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0511/55551_Page2.html
rikryah
I think Job Cremator and VULTURE CAPITALIST should be on the tip of every Democrat when they bring up Willard.
chopper
@Applejinx:
exactly. ‘cremator’ sounds like some weirdo creepy mortician type, which is romney to a T.
Paul in KY
I like the phrase too. Helps to make Romney seem more like Monty Burns.
Excellent!
WaterGirl
I don’t think either Job Cremator or Vulture Capitalist is going to win over the unengaged or uninformed voters, like my sister, who seem to be the tie breakers in these elections.
I am pretty sure she would hear Job Cremator as Job Creator, and she wouldn’t know what a venture capitalist is, so she wouldn’t get the play on words. She’s a smart person, she just pays no attention to politics or world news. Her take is that she can’t do anything about all of it, so she just focuses on her day to day life.
These are the people we need to get through to, and clever phrases aren’t going to do it.
burnspbesq
@Schlemizel:
“Not sure I get your point”
Did you read both paragraphs of my comment, or just the first?
Yutsano
@burnspbesq:
I’m guessing you mean Jim Bunning, unless Kentucky came up with another douchebag while I wasn’t looking. The rest of your comment infuriates me, but it’s not surprising. Rand Paul would LOVE to eliminate the IRS I bet.
MCA
Personally, I think the Democrats would benefit from a succinct way of educating the populace about what exactly private equity and venture cap are and how they work. Because I think at heart, not many people are going to buy the current thrust, which is “Romney and his cronies went into companies with the express purpose of firing lots of people and collecting gov’t bailouts.” You have to get people believing he’s out and out evil for that, but I think most folks will think “c’mon, Monty Burns and Gordon Gekko wouldn’t get a major party nomination for POTUS.”
In reality, Bain doesn’t benefit that much when a business they buy goes south – the idea is to buy at what they think is a discount based on their idea of unexploited opportunity available to a business, inject capital by leveraging it, insert their own management, skinny up cost and boost the bottom line, then sell a nicely humming little business. That’s the best way to ensure return for their investors and ensure they invest in the next fund.
The line to push, IMHO, is this:
Mitt Romney made his millions gambling with other peoples’ money, businesses and jobs. And when things went badly, who’s the only one who didn’t lose? Mitt Romney. In the blackjack game of business, Bain Capital is the house.
Republicans like to talk about how pro-capitalism they are. Is Mitt Romney what capitalism is supposed to be? Being President means making real decisions, with real risk, for real people like you. Do you want someone who’s never faced the consequences of his own poor decisions making them for you?
Play that at the end of a condensed version of the collapsed steel company story, right after tallying up the fees Romney and his guys made, and noting their 15% tax rate.
dogwood
@burnspbesq:
I’m not sure that the Dems are in any way SOL if he doesn’t release them. If he doesn’t, he just reinforces the idea that he’s hiding something since every candidate since Watergate has voluntarily done so. If he does then the public will undoubtedly see that he’s paying a lower rate than the average citizen. Either way it’s a win for the Dems.