The Bain days of summer are a welcome diversion from the weather. There is real enjoyment in watching Mitt and his team dig the hole deeper. Ed’s “retired retroactively” framing will be a gift that will just keep giving.
Missing in the Bain-haze was another foot-in-mouth defense of Mitt. This one was from campaign surrogate John Sununu:
Earlier Thursday, the campaign released a statement from former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu mocking the idea that Romney could have been engaged with the Olympics and Bain at the same time.
“The Obama campaign must think Mitt Romney is Superman. He was, in reality, rescuing the Olympics by working in Utah 24/7 for the years the Obama campaign also alleges he was running Bain Capital,” Sununu said.
Think about it for a moment. For three years Mitt was “rescuing” the Olympics. It took all of his focus. The only way that he could also have time to run any of his business empire was if he was some kind of a “Superman”. His surrogate mocks the very idea that Mitt Romney had the ability to manage two complicated projects at the same time. In the view of Sununu only a “Superman” could do such a thing.
And yet, managing varied, complicated and competing systems with shifting and emerging problems concurrently is the job of President of the United States. The President does not get to focus on just one thing. He or she has to be able to multi-task. In his first three years as President (roughly the same amount of time Mitt spent “rescuing” the Olympics), Barack Obama put policies in place and led an effort to halt a global financial meltdown; managed the end of the war in Iraq; managed the war in Afghanistan; managed a war against al-Qaeda (including the killing of Osama bin Laden); saved the American automobile industry from extinction; passed Health Care Reform; kept the US economy growing in the face of united Republican opposition to block any effort that might help; and hundreds of other things big and small.
It is a record of of managing problems equal to running more than three dozen 2002 Winter Olympics–simultaneously.
Contrast that record with Sununu’s defense that his candidate didn’t have the skills to run one Winter Olympics and his business at the same time. How does this admitted lack of Mitt’s ability to do even the most basic level of Presidential multi-tasking make Mitt a credible candidate?
By their own framing, Mitt and his team must think Obama is a super-duper Superman.
Cheers
ps: Mitt’s “rescue” of the Olympics relied on a $1.5 Billion taxpayer bailout. The 2002 Winter Olympics were a grifters feeding frenzy on US taxpayers as this 2001 report from Sports Illustrated makes clear. Perhaps this explains why Mitt could only focus on “rescuing” the Olympics and why his tax returns must never see the light of day…
Baud
If only the Olympics gave out gold medals for mendacity…
jlow
Sununu also said that “Obama needs to learn how to be an American”.
MonkeyBoy
So I presume that Bain and its various company entities was only able to raid one takeover at a time because otherwise Romney would have to be a Superman?
scav
OK, I give, I keep hearing Paul Simon’s One Trick Pony
Roger Moore
It’s simple: Obama can only do that stuff because he delegates. Romney is incapable of doing that because he’s a control freak. I think that should be a key angle to take on the whole business.
kindness
What? A $1.5B taxpayer financed trip for all that money to Bermuda & the Caiman Islands so Mittens could shore up the Olympics (by off shoring the money)? Unpossible. Would make a nice & tidy IRA though.
Mike Goetz
Obama response to Sununu:
You mad, bro?
Brachiator
When this is your best surrogate, you know things are bad.
Romney is the fat cat candidate with equally fat cat surrogates. A Man of the People, if the people are the one percent.
Legalize
It’s my understanding that the President often has more than one pressing issue on his plate. As do most professionals at their jobs, and most people in their lives. Willard, on the other hand, is single-tasker. I guess he could pay the middle-class wait staff to take care of the day-to-day.
amk
My tweet
sununu – born in cuba, to a salvadorian mother and palestinian father, is now the judge on who is american ? oh mitt, just quit.
Zach
…
Those are from a story about how the Olympics were so much work that it was stressing out Mitt, harming his marriage, etc from April 1999. I’m not all that surprised that Romney’s campaign hasn’t pushed the story out even though it would help their claim that Mitt was single-minded on SLC at the time.
Larkspur
I found that Sununu interview (the Andrea Mitchell one) so bizarre that I did a google search for it specifically, and then checked the blog filter for the last few days, and it was mostly stuff like:
Yes, I know these are blog quotes, which guarantees nothing in terms of either substance or gravitas (hi SMcG!), but it just reminds me that there’s a non-reality based cohort that is still having fun, fun, fun.
Tonal Crow
So Mr. Sununu, you seem to be saying that Romney can’t handle the Presidency. Do I understand you correctly?
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
I vaguely remembered the name Sununu, and keep thinking, ASSHOLE. It’s always nice to be correct.
bcinaz
Read the Sports Illustrated piece, if you thought Bush and Cheney were really good at shoveling money to cronys with both hands…Mitt has probably already promised to shift large chunks of money and publicly owned assets to his “SuperPac” supporters, et al. Bush and Cheney are amateurs compared to what ol’ Mitt would accomplish.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
You just have to look for the (R) after their name. It might as well be (Asshole).
Ruckus
@Zach:
even though it would help their claim that Mitt was
singlesimple-minded on SLC at the timeFxit for you
TenguPhule
I call bullshit on both the working and 24/7. If he spent more then an hour a day doing actual work on the Olympics rather then preening over the importance of being involved in the Olympics, I’d be surprised.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
That’s how I always see it.
Roger Moore
@TenguPhule:
FTFY.
J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford
This is excellent news for John McCain, who also couldn’t do more than one thing at a time.
rikyrah
Complete reply by the Obama campaign to John Sununu’s tirade:
‘
BWA HA HA HA HA
Zach
@rikyrah: Drat. I was really hoping for something along the lines of, “The only ones smoking anything today are in Boston. They must have some good stuff if they think this will end questions about why Mittens invested on Grand Cayman instead of in Grand Rapids. Romney needs to stop blowing smoke and come clean with the American people.”
trollhattan
More Sununu magic (via Chait). Speaking of the near in chief, of course:
Porco Rosso
Now I love Utah and I used to ski, but we’re talking Winter Olympics here. It’s a special Olympics for the melatonin challenged.
Not the same thing as a summer Olympics.
kerFuFFler
Great post! It’s so funny that in their hurry to defend Romney they make up stuff that hurts him1
Served
@trollhattan: The game is no fun when you call out all the Wingnut Bingo squares at the same time.
Porco Rosso
Gee, I thought the winter Olympics were a little more manageable than a Summer Olympics. What with the fewer participants and spectators.
Served
@trollhattan: The game is no fun when you call out all the Wingnut Bingo squares at the same time.
Served
@trollhattan: The game is no fun when you call out all the Wingnut Bingo squares at the same time.
Maude
@rikyrah:
Ouch.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
On the other hand, Sununu is proud of the fact that he is really, really smart:
He is also a member of the butt of the joke society.
Romney sure knows how to pick ’em.
The Dilbert strip can be seen here.
Origuy
@Porco Rosso: Melatonin is what helps you sleep; melanin is what makes you not a real American. Or was that a comment on your lack of interest in watching winter sports?
WaterGirl
@J.A.F. Rusty Shackleford: I just KNEW that had to be a link to a story on McCain suspending his campaign, but I clicked the link just for the fun of it. Good times.
j
Mitt “rescued” the Olympics by outsourcing the uniforms to the military dictatorship of Burma, and they were made by slave labor.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/16/mitt-romney-olympics-outsourced-uniforms-burma_n_1677791.html
How much in bribe money is Mitt hiding in his off shore accounts?
Tonal Crow
@kerFuFFler:
The Romney klown-show is just awesome. First they run away from his outsourcing record at Bain, conceding that outsourcing is a bad thing. Then they say he had absolutely nothing to do with Bain for ~2 years while he was CEO, Chairmain, President, and sole owner, thus basically confessing to a felony. Then they retroactively abort his campaign. And now this. Why don’t they just put on the size-45 shoes and the red plastic noses and make it official?
Mino
Let’s see. Mitt doesn’t want to run on his governorship because of Romneycare. Obama is swiftly making Bain a toxic soup. He made the Olympics are a sewer of earmarks for his friends.
The only thing left for Mitt to run on is his wife’s horse.
Mino
Let’s see. Mitt doesn’t want to run on his governorship because of Romneycare. Obama is swiftly making Bain a toxic soup. Romney made the Olympics a sewer of oursourcing and earmarks for his friends.
The only thing left for Mitt to run on is his wife’s horse.
Bobby Thomson
Not only that, but Bain apparently ran itself while he was gone. Willard was the CEO, but he wasn’t, and we’re supposed to believe that he never stepped in at all. Two things flow from that:
1) He wasn’t doing a whole lot before February 1999, either, since he could stop all of his contributions toward managing the company without naming an interim CEO and without even stopping by once a month or so – and no one cared.
2) Even though he wasn’t doing a whole lot before February 1999, even that little bit would have been more than he could bear on top of the responsibility of asking for handouts to save the Olympics.
In other words, we’re supposed to believe that this lightweight who can’t even participate in the affairs of a business that literally runs itself was ever more than a figurehead, back in the days when he ostensibly was running the joint. And that he can manage several multi-billion dollar enterprises simultaneously.
I just love watching Willard punch himself in the junk repeatedly. Never gets old.
trollhattan
@j:
Even if this didn’t come from Willard his ownself, this sums up his approach to inconvenient things, perfectly.
Porco Rosso
@Origuy:
Right. If I wasn’t taking it for sleep right now and had enough sleep I would have said melanin