Ethel Mormon

As anyone who knows me or who has been following my blog regularly should be well aware, I am no fan of chronic liar and dog abuser Willard “Mittful of Dollars” Romney.  But, as a karaoke devotee who quite regularly sets Frank Sinatra to spinning in his grave, I felt a certain amount of

The First Robot-American Candidate for President

sympathy for him when I saw this.

Despite his  unimpressive singing voice, the ploy really should have worked.  This was an elderly Republican crowd, the kind of people who regularly railed at Barry O for not wearing a flag pin, who wear the flag at every opportunity, who just love all that patriotic schmaltz, and they would have joined right in if they’d been asked by anybody with even a smidgin of stage presence.  But Mitt Romney is like the dark matter, the negative energy, the polar opposite of a motivational speaker or an evengelical preacher.  When he did his Mormon mission to France, I’m imagining wine drinking and the smoking of nasty Gauloise cigarettes actually went UP.

This was not just a politician failing to connect with his audience.  This was like a comic bombing on amateur night, this was like Rick Perry forgetting what he was talking about in the middle of the sentence, this was like Miss South Carolina going off on maps, such as, and people in the Iraq and South Africa and wherever.  This was horrible.

It was embarrassingly bad, but will it finish Mitt Romney?  I doubt it.  He has apparently survived the revelations of his secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, his horrible job-slashing record at Bain Capital, the whole tying the family dog to the roof of the car thing, and wiping out the hard drives to conceal whatever nastiness he was up to when he was governor of Massachusetts.  It sure didn’t help him, though.

So, why did he do it?  Well, it was undoubtedly in response to this.  But it was a foolish, and counterproductive response.  One rule of politics (which also applies to war and foreign policy) is, don’t get involved in a fight you can’t win.

If Mitt doesn’t understand that then he won’t, and shouldn’t, be president.