“The sicker the patient, the less important is bedside manner. If you’ve just been diagnosed with a brain tumor, you honestly don’t care if your neurosurgeon is a jerk. You don’t care if he has a great personality. You want to know if you’re going to cut my head open, can you get the job done?”
— Mike Huckabee, quoted by the Daily Beast, using a novel way to sell the staid Mitt Romney.
Mitt Romney’s campaign complained today that President Obama was breaking “a three-decade precedent by personally campaigning during the opposing party’s convention.”
Alex Burns: “Democrats now counter that Mitt Romney isn’t exactly pure in this respect: In 2008, he traveled to Denver during the Democratic convention and taped a major interview with Katie Couric to counter-program Obama’s events… It’s not a parallel situation, since Romney wasn’t on his party’s ticket that year, let alone an incumbent president… But in terms of GOP complaints about Democratic bracketing, Romney’s ’08 role is sort of a complicating factor.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie told the Newark Star Ledger he won’t be touting his state’s economic recovery during his Republican convention keynote address.
Said Christie: “Let’s make one thing really clear. There are three words that are not in my speech Tuesday night: ‘The Jersey Comeback.’ So for all those Democrats real worried or got real excited that maybe I’d have to take it out or maybe I put it in, those three words aren’t in the speech.”
First Read: “There’s a reason for that. When Christie took office in Jan. 2010 unemployment was 9.7 percent. It dropped to 9.0 percent earlier this year, but has since ballooned to 9.8 percent – the highest it’s been in 35 years.”
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In the mail: Thank the Liberals… for Saving America by Alan Colmes.
Former GOP operative Roger Stone tells New York magazine he thinks politics has gotten a lot less interesting since his days as a Nixon campaign staffer, mainly because there are “fewer and fewer” dirty tricks.
Said Stone of the Romney campaign: “They don’t even have any clean tricks. I don’t know how you run a one-dimensional campaign.”
A new CNN/Opinion Research poll finds 70% of Republicans nationally are satisfied with Mitt Romney as their party’s presidential nominee with 30% wishing for someone else.
Said pollster Keating Holland: “Historically, that figure is not bad. In mid-August, 2008, more than four in ten Republicans said they would prefer someone other than John McCain as the Republican nominee. Thirty-seven percent of Democrats said in August, 2008, that they would prefer Hillary Clinton as their party’s nominee.”
Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) has launched a political action committee, Gabby PAC, suggesting her days in politics are not over, Politico reports.
Giffords, who survived being shot in the head in January 2011, resigned her congressional seat in January.
John Avlon: “New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s keynote address is the substantive center-piece of this first night of the Republican Convention. But contrary to expectations that he will play the traditional role of attack dog, the former U.S. Attorney will instead lay out a positive Republican vision of change for the nation – rooted in policy, biography and his surprisingly bipartisan accomplishments in the Garden State.”
“President Obama’s never run a company. He hasn’t even run a garage sale or seen the inside of a lemonade stand.”
— RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, quoted by the Associated Press.
A new Public Policy Polling survey in Iowa finds President Obama barely ahead of Mitt Romney , 47% to 45%.
Obama led by five points in July and by 10 points in May.
Key findings: “Iowa makes yet another swing state where voters don’t really care for either Obama or Romney. Obama’s approval numbers are particularly poor with only 45% of voters approving of him to 50% who disapprove. The fact that he has a small lead in the state despite his under water approval speaks to at least some voters regarding this election as a choice rather than a referendum. Voters aren’t big on Romney either with 47% rating him favorably to 48% with an unfavorable opinion.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign tried to play down talk that he will receive the kind of significant bump in the polls that candidates traditionally enjoy after their party convention, Reuters reports.
Said adviser Stu Stevens: “I just think all bets are off about any kind of past performance being a predictor of the future.”
Jonathan Chait: “A Republican strategist said something interesting and revealing on Friday, though it largely escaped attention in the howling gusts of punditry over Mitt Romney’s birth certificate crack and a potential convention-altering hurricane. The subject was a Ron Brownstein story outlining the demographic hit rates each party requires to win in November. To squeak out a majority, Mitt Romney probably needs to win at least 61% of the white vote — a figure exceeding what George H.W. Bush commanded over Michael Dukakis in 1988.”
Said the GOP strategist: “This is the last time anyone will try to do this.”
Translation: “This is their last, best chance to win an election in the party’s current demographic and ideological form. Future generations of GOP politicians will have to appeal to nonwhite voters who hold far more liberal views about the role of government than does the party’s current base.”
John Judis: “It could still work in November 2012 — because of Obama’s weakness among the electorate. But it won’t lay the basis for a new Republican majority.”
Gawker points us to a priceless video of Wisconsin Lt. Governor Rebecca Kleefisch (R) calling Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) attempt to categorize rape “abhorrent, insulting” and “disgusting.”
Said Kleefisch: “Rape is a rape. I don’t know how you can categorize it, and it’s disgusting that Todd Akin would have tried to categorize it.”
Then the interviewer informed her that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) co-sponsored a bill with Akin aimed at categorizing rape.
Kleefisch quickly backtracked: “Well, I think there is a way to have a more forcible rape, the same way there are different types of assault.”
A new DailyKos/SEIU/Public Policy Polling survey finds that 75% of American voters are opposed a constitutional amendment banning abortions without exception — even in case of rape or incest — while 13% support such an amendment and 12% aren’t sure.
“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was
inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad. They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead.”
— Mitt Romney, quoted by Greg Sargent earlier this month.
“We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers.”
— Romney pollster Neil Newhouse, quoted by BuzzFeed this morning, after it was pointed out that fact checkers say the Romney campaign’s welfare attacks on President Obama are not true.
First Read: “In addition to the speeches by Ann Romney and Chris Christie, the Romney camp has been billing Rick Santorum’s address tonight, which he’ll deliver during the 7:00 pm ET hour… Expect the former Pennsylvania senator and GOP presidential candidate to deliver the debunked welfare attack hitting Obama, which would certainly fire up the crowd here. While Christie might be the keynote speaker for suburban America, Santorum might be the keynote speaker for inside the hall.”
Maggie Haberman: “The prime time speeches are Ann Romney and Chris Christie, who will
be delivering messages aimed at defining the candidate as both human and
leaderly. The Santorum speech involves a messaging hat-trick.”
“I would tell Mitt Romney these are not nice people, these are vicious people and you have to fight back viciously.”
— Donald Trump, in an interview with David Brody, on President Obama’s
campaign staff.
Four U.S. Army soldiers “killed a former comrade and his girlfriend to protect an anarchist militia group they formed that stockpiled assault weapons and plotted a range of anti-government attacks,” the AP reports.
“The prosecutor said the militia group had big plans. It plotted to take over Fort Stewart by seizing its ammunition control point and talked of bombing the Forsyth Park fountain in nearby Savannah, she said. In Washington state, she added, the group plotted to bomb a dam and poison the state’s apple crop. Ultimately, prosecutors said, the militia’s goal was to overthrow the government and assassinate the president.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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