Mitt Romney on hidden camera

[superblytrife]

All I know is that in '08, McCain chose Sarah Palin over Mitt Romney as his running mate.

Sarah. Palin.

SARAH. PALIN.

That's all I need to know about Mitt Romney.

 

[futuremd]

All I know is that in '08, McCain chose Sarah Palin over Mitt Romney as his running mate.

Sarah. Palin.

SARAH. PALIN.

That's all I need to know about Mitt Romney.

Great point.

I read an article in GQ that talked about the process for vetting a VP.

There was something SO shady or off about Romney that they went with Palin.

That says something. 

Spoiler: GQ%20Article

[h5]GO BACK[/h5][h5]PRINT THIS PAGE[/h5]

[h5]Politics[/h5][h1]Wanna Be Veep? Okay, but This Is Going to Hurt[/h1][h2]For months, Mitt Romney's most trusted dirt-diggers have been scouring the secret histories of several Republicans—including punchy Chris Christie, sexy Marco Rubio, snoozy Rob Portman—as they jockey to be his running mate. It's veep-vetting season, and it's the most invasive process in politics. Just how squeamish does it get? We sent Jason Zengerle to one of Washington's top vetters to find out if he's got what it takes to be the next (God help us all) Sarah Palin[/h2]
BY JASON ZENGERLE

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JEFF UELAND

August 2012

Less than an hour after I meet the vetter for the first time, he asks me if I've always been faithful to my wife. Next he wants to know if I've ever been accused of sexual harassment. And then whether I've ever paid for sex. Before long he's asking me about any past history I might have with sadomasochism. Internet-porn memberships? Sexting? We are on the top floor of an anonymous glass-and-steel office building in Washington, D.C.—the kind of place where, far more than the marble halls of Congress, the real business of America's capital gets done. The National Cathedral looms out the window over his shoulder. As he grills me about my sexual history, he does not dull the awkwardness by looking down at his desk and hiding in the papers in front of him. He stares me hard in the eye. So far, I've answered "yes" to the question about my fidelity and "no" to all of the other ones. I don't text much, and when I do, it's usually to my wife, checking on whose turn it is to pick up the kids at preschool. But he is far from done.

"Have you ever," he asks, "had a homosexual encounter?"

"No."

"Could a rogue IT guy have access to a sex tape or anything like that?"

"No."

He makes a check mark on his sheet of paper, and then there's a long pause. I start to think I'm finally out of the woods. But no, he has a follow-up, a loophole in his last question that needs closing. He looks right at me. "Is there a sex tape?"

No! No to all of it! I am dull as dirt! I'm a happily married dad with pitifully little to hide! So... Why am I so nervous? Why is my heart racing? Have  I done something bad? Inquisitions, I'm discovering, are scary even when you're kind of a square.

···​

[size=-1]Pugilistic New Jersey governor Chris Christie[/size]

The fallout from the Sarah Palin experiment has cast a long shadow over Mitt Romney's search this summer for a running mate. The list of candidates that his Boston team is rumored to be vetting—which includes Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, Ohio senator Rob Portman, and former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty—does not feature any game changers, at least none on the order of Palin. In fact, the conventional wisdom around Washington is that Romney will go with an anti-Palin—or as one GOP official told Politico  in May, an "incredibly boring white guy." The "white guy" part should be easy enough to verify. But when it comes to "incredibly boring," well, reckless people sometimes come in the dullest packages. Just ask Larry Craig. In this post-Palin season, the Romney campaign is surely conducting the most exhaustive vet in political history to make sure the boss's running mate is every bit as bland as advertised.

To get a sense of how it feels to have your life history poked, probed, and peeled back, GQ  sent me to Washington so I could be put through the wringer myself. "You just have to know going in," former Indiana senator Evan Bayh told me, "that it's totally invasive. It's like having a colonoscopy, except they use the Hubble telescope on you." Until he retired from the Senate in 2010, Bayh was just the sort of bland yet ambitious Democrat who invariably wound up on vice presidential lists before invariably getting passed over for someone else. Al Gore, John Kerry, and Barack Obama all considered him; according to Obama's 2008 campaign manager, David Plouffe, Bayh lost out to Joe Biden on "a coin toss." (Biden's foreign-policy experience—which shored up a perceived liability for Obama—was widely seen as the difference maker.)

A few hours before my first meeting with my vetter, I visited Bayh at his K Street lobbying firm. He'd been through repeated vets, all for naught, so I figured he might have some expert advice for me. "There are some catchall questions at the very end," he warned, recalling something Obama put to him directly during their top-secret meeting at a St. Louis hotel. (Bayh rode the freight elevator to the room.) "He said, 'Look, they're talking to people I went to first grade with, so if there's anything about you that we haven't asked that's going to come out, you should tell me.' I said, 'Well, there are one or two things I should probably tell you about,' and I did." Bayh declined to share with me what he revealed to Obama, but it sounds like they weren't exactly smoking guns: "[Obama] said, 'That's it? Well, you haven't lived much of a life, have you?' "

The man who was conducting my vet, Ted Frank, built his career as an attorney defending automakers and pharmaceutical giants from product-liability suits. Now he represents consumers who are dissatisfied with class-action settlements. The next time a Republican takes the White House, he'll probably get an important Justice Department job, maybe even a federal judgeship. He is 43, has slicked-back hair, favors dark suits, and looks altogether like a member of the Federalist Society, which he is.

In April 2008, a colleague at his old law firm, O'Melveny & Myers, asked Frank if he wanted to work on a sensitive matter: helping John McCain find a running mate. The firm's then chairman, A. B. Culvahouse Jr., had been tasked with the job and needed assistance. Along with a team of about thirty other lawyers, Frank spent the next five months poring over the private lives, voting records, and tax returns of Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin, among others. He was now a veep vetter—one of a handful of dirt-diggers and interrogators who, every four years, help fill out the bottom half of presidential tickets.

And in short order, Frank would become a minor political celebrity as well: He was the author of what is surely the most infamous document in veep-vetting history—the forty-five-page report he produced on Palin, assembled over the course of forty-three frantic hours in August after she was added at the last minute to McCain's short list. If you've seen Game Change, the HBO movie about the Palin soap opera, Frank is played by Brian d'Arcy James, who doesn't have any speaking lines but does a very good job of looking so nervous and exhausted that he might puke.

Technically my vet—a junior-varsity version of the real thing—had already begun a few weeks before our first meeting, when Frank sent me a fifty-four-part biographical questionnaire. Most of the information required was reasonably mundane: my mother-in-law's birthday, my Selective Service number, a list of foreign countries I'd visited "other than for vacation or a governmental capacity." (Translation: Had I perhaps adopted a child and/or fomented a revolution in Honduras?) Of course, my questionnaire wasn't as extensive as the seventy-nine-part document Frank and his colleagues had sent to McCain's potential veeps four years ago. I'm not a politician, so I have no voting record to dissect or speeches to review. Also, as a journalist, my financial situation—unlike that of the average senator, whose net worth is around $2.5 million—is depressingly straightforward. Save for a few questions (like, say, number 31: "Have you ever used marijuana, cocaine, narcotics, hallucinogenics, or other illegal drugs? If yes, please identify the substance(s) used, the time period and frequency of use, and any other details you deem relevant...."), the questionnaire was more irritating to complete (do you  remember your SAT scores?) than invasive.

The in-person meeting, on the other hand, is very different. It starts unobtrusively enough. "So you're the vice president, and the president is visiting Seoul," Frank begins, unspooling an elaborate scenario in which the president's hotel gets decimated by a car bomb, 200,000 North Korean troops cross the DMZ, and the Joint Chiefs urge me to take out Pyongyang with a tactical nuclear weapon. "Do you authorize the strike?" he asks, trying to get a sense of my political judgment (as much a part of the vet now as excavating secrets). I wonder if the question is also a reaction to Frank's Palin experience, recalling the scene in Game Change  in which Palin reveals that she doesn't even know that there are two Koreas. But I push those thoughts aside and dodge the question by asking for more military options, trying to cover my fecklessness by name-dropping Seal Team Six. Next, Frank hits me with an easier hypothetical, about a deadlocked Senate and a Supreme Court nominee who appears to be against gay marriage. "Do you support the president and cast the tiebreaker in favor of the president's nominee?" he asks. Of course I do, I respond. I'm a team player. The president can always count on me.

As I field Frank's softballs—"What would your professors and classmates say about your performance at Swarthmore?"—I begin to think that maybe Bayh isn't just boring, he's also a wuss. Colonoscopy? Hubble telescope? Come on. This isn't so bad! In my head, I'm already measuring the hypothetical drapes in the hypothetical West Wing office I'll hypothetically demand when Frank's hypothetical boss begs me to be his hypothetical running mate.

But then Frank's questions take a sudden turn. We are no longer talking about my junior-year Gothic-art-and-architecture seminar. Now it's my sex life. And my drug history. And the lowest moments of my journalism career. "It's an intrusive process," Frank advised me at the outset, "but if you've lived a clean life, it won't be that embarrassing for either of us." Easy for him to say.
MEN WHO MIGHT'VE BEHAVED BADLY
If you were vetting the politicians rumored to be on Mitt Romney's vice presidential short list, where would you start digging? Here's Ted Frank's take.[table][tr][/tr][tr][td]
Chris Christie
[size=-1]governor, New Jersey [/size]

The Risk Area
Prosecutorial deal-making

"As a U.S. attorney, Christie negotiated at least one deferred agreement where a defendant gave money to Christie's alma mater and avoided criminal prosecution." Are there more?
[/td][td]
John Thune
[size=-1]U.S. senator, South Dakota [/size]

The Risk Area
Religious affiliations

Though Frank believes it's probably harmless, he'd want to check into Thune's membership in "The Family," a secretive Christian influence group. Could spook independent voters.
[/td][td]
Rob Portman
[size=-1]U.S. senator, Ohio[/size]  

The Risk Area
Ties to Bush 43

He was Bush's budget director, and that name's still radioactive. Also, he worked for bare-knuckle lobbying firm Patton Boggs; "vetters will want to scrutinize his work there carefully."
[/td][/tr][tr][td]
Tim Pawlenty
[size=-1]former governor, Minnesota [/size]

The Risk Area
Attacks on Romney

Because he ran for president, Pawlenty "has given dozens of speeches where he might've spoken ill of Romney," so the boss's campaign "will need to prep for the inevitable viral videos."
[/td][td]
Marco Rubio
[size=-1]U.S. senator, Florida[/size]  

The Risk Area
Unproven policy chops

"Republicans without an Ivy League pedigree are presumed by the media to be of subpar intelligence," so it'll be crucial to know "how he'd respond to Palin-level scrutiny on policy minutiae."
[/td][td]
Bobby Jindal
[size=-1]governor, Louisiana[/size]  

The Risk Area
Faith-based extremism

Frank says Dems will pounce on an article Jindal once wrote for the New Oxford Review about "spiritual warfare" and attending an exorcism. Also, he'd scrutinize Jindal's ties to trial lawyers.
[/td][/tr][/table]

···​

"No skeletons rattling in your closet?"

With those six words, the process of selecting vice presidents changed forever, giving birth to an entire veep-vetting industry and, eventually, to multipart questions about sex tapes.

It was the afternoon of July 13, 1972—the last day of the Democratic National Convention—and Frank Mankiewicz, the political director for George McGovern's presidential campaign, was on the phone with Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton. Moments earlier, the party's newly minted nominee had placed a call from his Miami hotel suite to Eagleton's room two miles away and offered him the number two spot on the ticket. "George, before you change your mind, I accept," Eagleton replied, surrounded by family, friends, and reporters. Now, as Joshua Glasser recounts in his new book The Eighteen-Day Running Mate, Mankiewicz had come on the line to do a little pro forma housekeeping.

For years, this was how veep vetting was done. Which is to say, not done. Until 1944, when FDR dumped Henry Wallace for Harry Truman, the presidential candidate didn't even pick his own running mate; that job typically fell to convention delegates. Even after Roosevelt changed the game, the selection process was still informal and ad hoc—partly because it tended to happen at the last minute, with the top of the ticket not being decided until the convention, but also because of etiquette. Politicians just weren't in the habit of asking one another nosy personal questions. "I'm a United States senator," Alabama segregationist John Sparkman, who was Adlai Stevenson's 1952 running mate, later told McGovern about his gentle vetting. "I'm not going to be interrogated on my personal life."

Then came Tom Eagleton. When Mankiewicz asked him if he had any skeletons—or rather, sought reassurance that he didn't—Eagleton failed to mention that he'd been hospitalized three times for depression and had received electroshock therapy. Almost immediately after Eagleton was added to the ticket, the information leaked to the media, causing a firestorm. "Since you have conceded election to Nixon by selection of a psychotic running mate," one irate Democratic donor wrote in a telegram to McGovern, "I would like a refund of money contributed when you were a viable candidate." McGovern had to dump Eagleton less than three weeks later.

The Eagleton debacle was still fresh in Jimmy Carter's mind by the time he effectively wrapped up the Democratic presidential nomination in April 1976. He tapped his consigliere, Georgia lawyer Charlie Kirbo, to dig up as much information as he could about the seven men he was considering for VP. Kirbo conducted extensive background interviews, requested tax returns and medical histories, then met with each prospective candidate in person. Walter Mondale still remembers the day Kirbo showed up in his Senate office and didn't leave for three hours. "He came in with a yellow legal pad full of questions, and he hit me with everything he could think of," Mondale told me. "When it was over, I felt like I'd passed some sort of test. I wasn't going to jail." Mondale had one subsequent meeting with Carter, and then he was on the ticket.

[table][tr][td][size=-1]Former Minnesota governor (and vanquished Romney foe) Tim Pawlenty[/size][/td][/tr][/table]

There's very little about Jimmy Carter that American politicians emulate now, but his vetting process set the standard. To this day, future presidents themselves don't face the level of scrutiny experienced by their potential veeps. "Even when you run for office, nobody has access to everything you give them when you go through the vetting," Bayh says. The clever dodges that can rescue a presidential candidacy—Bill Clinton answering adultery allegations by saying he'd "caused pain" in his marriage; George W. Bush addressing cocaine use by saying, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible"—won't cut it in a veep vet. Every affair, every line of blow, has to be disclosed and explained in detail. For some politicians, the scrutiny can be too much. Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, who ran for the White House in 2008, declined to be considered for the job of John Kerry's running mate in 2004. "Richardson wanted to be mentioned," Bob Shrum, Kerry's top strategist, told me, "but he didn't want to go through the vetting." Considering the ethical cloud that now hangs over Richardson—who's spent the past three years dealing with corruption and adultery allegations—that was probably a prudent move.

Politicians who do subject themselves to a veep vet soon find it taking over their lives. When Bayh was under consideration by Obama, he had been suffering from a stomach ailment that, despite his doctors' best efforts—cancer tests, full-body imaging, radioisotope gastric-emptying scans—remained undiagnosed. Obama's vetting team, led by Eric Holder, demanded an answer. "They wanted to make sure I wasn't dying," Bayh says now. He wasn't. After several thousand dollars more for tests and a trip to a specialist in Massachusetts—Bayh had to pay for all of it—he finally got a diagnosis: adult-onset gluten sensitivity. And then he didn't get the job.

Until Palin came along, the most notorious vetting saga was the 2000 Republican process led by **** Cheney, who, of course, ended up recommending himself. In that year, Cheney vetted at least ten potential running mates for George W. Bush, including then Oklahoma governor Frank Keating. Keating was a former FBI agent, and by 2000 he'd been through four separate Senate confirmation processes. In other words, he was used to people poking around in his life. But nothing prepared him for the scope of Cheney's inquiry. The questionnaire contained nearly 200 questions under seventy-nine headings. In addition to the typical queries about infidelity, drug use, and psychiatric treatment, Keating was also asked whether there was anything in his past or present that might make him "vulnerable to blackmail or coercion." Cheney even required Keating to sign a notarized authorization for "Richard B. Cheney or...any person designated by him" to obtain "all information and records relating to my physical or mental health...during any time period."

Keating's responses totaled more than a thousand pages and filled two massive three-ring binders, which he generously lugged out of storage when I visited him at his Washington office, where he now works as the president of the American Bankers Association. As we flipped through the files twelve years later, Keating was still in awe of the undertaking. ("Just stunning," he said.) He was also bitter. For one thing, he felt like he was never really being considered; after he submitted his binders, he didn't hear again from the Bush campaign until seven weeks later—when Bush called to tell Keating that he'd picked Cheney. "There was never even a follow-up question or a phone call," he groused. "To make people go through that kind of labor—and you're not even pregnant—was no fun."

Even worse was what happened after Bush was elected. Keating was up for attorney general, but Cheney reportedly favored John Ashcroft for the job. Keating's chances ultimately flamed out over some financial details—specifically, $250,000 in personal (and perfectly legal) gifts he'd accepted from an eccentric philanthropist friend—that he had disclosed during his vet. As Keating told Barton Gellman for his book about Cheney, Angler, "It obviously came from **** Cheney or one of his people.... To say that it was chicken****, excuse the expression, is an understatement.... **** Cheney coming into my life has been like a black cloud." When he saw me, Keating went for a joke. "I gave Cheney all of that," he said, nodding to the binders, "and he's never even sent me a Christmas card."

···​

The first rule of being a veep vetter—if you're not **** Cheney, anyway—is that you do not talk about being a veep vetter. So Ted Frank is wary of saying too much about his Sarah Palin experience. Still, he knows the perception is out there that his team blew it. When I told Evan Bayh that the guy who vetted Palin was vetting me, he replied with a smirk, "I'm not sure that'd be the place I'd go to for a strenuous vet."

And yet Frank insists that the Palin vet was exhaustive, even considering the unhelpful circumstances. Working under terrible time pressure, as well as constraints imposed by the McCain campaign's secrecy concerns—to avoid tipping off anyone that Palin was under consideration, the vetters didn't interview anyone outside of her staff about her—Frank submitted a forty-five-page report cataloging almost everything that would eventually dog her on the campaign trail. Todd Palin's DUI arrest (which she revealed on the questionnaire), her teenage daughter Bristol's pregnancy (which she confided during a three-hour phone interview with Culvahouse, Frank, and a third vetter), and Troopergate (which Frank pieced together through public documents and conversations with Palin's private attorney) were all uncovered by the vet. The only thing the report missed was Todd's membership in the Alaska Independence Party.

"We had things in there that never came out," Frank tells me. "We had things that Palin didn't even know about." Still, Frank admits he saw the same upside in Palin that McCain's political team did. "I wasn't sick to my stomach about her," he says, getting in a dig at the portrayal of him on HBO. After all, it was Frank's vetting report that his boss, Culvahouse, was largely relying upon when he offered up to McCain his assessment of Palin's potential as a running mate: "High risk, high reward."

Occasionally during our first meeting, I get the sense that Frank has taken on my vet as a shot at redemption—to show the world, which will likely never see the Palin report, that he's a pro at this. On my questionnaire, I'd copped to smoking way too much pot in college. Now Frank asks me to elaborate. I recall for him my sophomore year and my job as a pizza deliverer, which involved my getting stoned with some co-workers and then driving pies to customers.

"Have you ever been pulled over for driving impaired?" Frank asks.

"Nope, never," I reply.

"Have you ever had an auto accident that was caused where anyone was hurt?" No, I say—but I do mention the telephone pole I backed into one night. He moves on to more fertile territory. On my questionnaire, I wrote that I had "supplied" pot to friends. Frank smells blood.

"I want to go into the verb supplied," he says. "What did that entail?"

"Letting friends use it," I say.

"How much were you purchasing and distributing?"

"Not much." I explain that I never actually purchased the pot myself but would pay back a friend who bought it for me.

"How much were you spending, say, a month?" Frank asks.

"Not more than fifty bucks," I reply, explaining that I didn't need to spend more because I could usually just smoke my friends'. I have no troublesome history of dealing weed—just mooching it. Based on Frank's bemused expression, I gather this is not a fatal character flaw, at least for a potential veep.

Next he zeroes in on a woman my wife and I had hired a couple of years ago to clean our apartment occasionally.

"Was she an American citizen?" Frank wants to know.

"I never asked," I tell him, though I note that she spoke English with a Portuguese accent.

"Did she have a green card?"

"I never looked. I never inquired."

Frank asks the same questions about a babysitter who would occasionally pick up our son at preschool when my wife and I were busy at work. She spoke unaccented English, but when Frank asks if we gave her a 1099 tax form, I admit that we didn't.

"Did you pay her more than $600 a year?"

Yes, I think we did. Frank's eyebrows arch.

"So, potentially, a few tax problems," he says, scribbling on his sheet of paper.

[table][tr][td][size=-1]Louisiana governor (and Indian-American political trailblazer) Bobby Jindal[/size][/td][/tr][/table]

On issue after issue, Frank digs and quickly hits bedrock. He doesn't just want to know whether I was bar mitzvahed but also whether we had a bris for our son. Yes to both. He turns up a particularly tasteless haiku I'd written for my college humor magazine—"the blood stained carpet / reeks of brains and gun powder / smells like teen spirit" (sorry)—and wonders if there are more. There aren't. He even gets into what I've dressed up as for Halloween: "Are there photos of you, or can anybody testify about or make claims about you doing something offensive, dressing up as a Nazi or something racist or sexist?" Nope.

Finally, Frank gets to the question Bayh had warned me about: "Is there anything I haven't asked you that might come out in Gawker or Daily Kos or some horrible right-wing blog?" I decide to confess the big family secret: that my octogenarian grandfather was once a bookie connected to the Philadelphia mob and was convicted of illegal gambling activity. (His sentence: probation, plus he had to have a party telephone line in his house for a number of years.) Even this, to my surprise, doesn't faze Frank. Too long ago. He tells me that he'll hire an investigator to interview my friends, enemies, even an ex-girlfriend, to look into a few of the potential problems the vet has raised. But he appears convinced that there's no deep dark secret—much less a sex tape—to be found. Of course, that doesn't necessarily make me fit to fill Spiro Agnew's shoes.

···​

"The problem with these vetting processes," Bob Shrum had told me, "is that you're always vetting for the last problem." After Eagleton, for instance, everyone was on the lookout for medical anomalies; after Dan Quayle, vetters fixated on draft records. But a good vetter doesn't just take cues from the past; he anticipates fresh dangers.

Frank tells me that if he were vetting veep prospects for Mitt Romney, he knows exactly where he'd dig carefully: mortgages. "Someone could get tripped up by a liar loan," he says, referring to mortgages in which the borrower overstates his or her income. Given how prevalent the practice was during the housing bubble, Frank thinks it's possible that somebody on Romney's list did it, especially if he hails from a state where the bubble was especially outrageous. (Like, say, Florida or Nevada.)

Similarly, Frank says he'd spend a lot of time on a potential Romney veep's religious beliefs—and not just their current ones. Has the candidate always been an evangelical (John Thune) or a Catholic (Chris Christie)? Or has his path been circuitous, like that of Marco Rubio, who spent his childhood as a Mormon before converting to, and sticking with, Catholicism? Spiritual questing could be a problem, Frank explains, "because there's going to be skepticism about Romney's religion, and you don't want skepticism about both halves of the ticket."

Peering even farther into the future, Frank wonders about the types of questions that will be asked of the potential veeps in 2020 and beyond—people who are now in their twenties and thirties. "Right now the politicians we're dealing with are largely people who married their high school or college sweetheart," he says. "They don't have a history of being single in their twenties." The next generation of politicians probably will, which means vetters will want to know more about their sex lives as single adults. "Are there whips? Are there chains? To what extent do people kiss and tell?" Frank wonders. "We're learning with the David Maraniss book, here's Obama's ex-girlfriend turning over her diaries. And here's one of Christine O'Donnell's former hookups going to Gawker. I think future vetters are going to have to think about this."

And what about me? Am I vice presidential material? When we meet for the final time, Frank tells me that his investigator didn't turn up much. Even one of my exes had mostly nice things to say about me. A college pal told the investigator something I'd forgotten—that I'd named my bong after my grandfather—but Frank doesn't care about that. What does  he care about? Well... My tax returns showed that I've made very few charitable contributions. ("There'd be a one-day story about how you don't give much.") My financial records revealed that I have way too much money in my checking account. ("Someone's going to say, 'Oh, he doesn't know how to manage his money. How can somebody who clearly knows so little be put in charge of our economy?' ") My medical history disclosed that ten years ago I had testicular cancer. ("People understand that.") My college drug use. ("Ideally, you're a politician already and somebody's asked you six years ago, and you said, 'Oh yeah, I used in college and I stopped after.' ") My grandfather. (The bookmaking, not the bong I named after him. "It comes up as an interesting story, but it doesn't get used against you. We have somebody research that and then feed it to a journalist: 'Hey, here's an interesting slice of Americana.' ")

"Skipping over the fact that you have no experience and we don't know where you stand on any issues," Frank says, it turns out my biggest problems are two that hadn't even crossed my mind: the taxes we haven't paid on babysitters, and the housecleaner who might've been here illegally. Frank sums up the report he'd give to the guy at the top of the ticket. "We would say, 'He's got the domestic-help issue, and that has torpedoed candidacies in the past. You're going to have to make a judgment call, Governor, whether you want Jason Zengerle enough to weather that storm.' "

The real problem with Jason Zengerle, though, is one that Frank is too polite to say to me: I'm too boring—even for Mitt Romney. I'm Tim Pawlenty without the truck-driver father. I'm John Thune minus the tan. I'm Rob Portman without Ohio's eighteen electoral votes. There's no getting around what I am, and in modern politics, it's a killer: low risk, low reward.

Jason Zengerle is a GQ  contributing editor.

 

[Kimchi Papi]

Romney campaign catching a bad one this week. Eastwood said his campaign was dumb for asking him to speak...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/18/clint-eastwood-rnc-speech-oddball-stupid_n_1894532.html

 

[boys noize]

How does Mitt Romney recover from the week he just had?

 

[futuremd]

How does Mitt Romney recover from the week he just had?

It doesn't matter. 

The people who need to hear this, won't. 

 

[boys noize]

It doesn't matter. 

The people who need to hear this, won't. 

It's pretty mind-blowing. This is Mitt Romney at his most candid. He is not mincing any of his words. This is exactly how he feels. No politics or spin or any of that. He has literally said he thinks people that "rely on government" are victims. He is literally calling a massive percentage of his voting block victims.

I want to believe that this is simply too much for the disconnect. That this will actually be something that sways moderate Republicans away from Romney.

 

[essential1]

They'll hear about it... Obama will keep shoving it down Mitt's throat..

 

[rocky437]

47% of Americans pay no income tax. Damn. I'm from Canada but I see on the news that is cold truth. I'm sure many Americans weren't even aware of that fact and it was a wakeup call.

 

[biggie62]

47% of Americans pay no income tax. Damn. I'm from Canada but I see on the news that is cold truth. I'm sure many Americans weren't even aware of that fact and it was a wakeup call.

Not really, almost 20% of those 47% of those are retired people who have paid taxes throughout their lives and now are just living off their pensions and social security. Hence why using this statement actually does nothing more than kill almost 50% of the Republican voter base.

 

[essential1]

47% of Americans pay no income tax. Damn. I'm from Canada but I see on the news that is cold truth. I'm sure many Americans weren't even aware of that fact and it was a wakeup call.

They still pay taxes in one form or another.... Not a wake up call for anyone but people who want to classify them as "moochers"

 

[futuremd]

47% of Americans pay no income tax. Damn. I'm from Canada but I see on the news that is cold truth. I'm sure many Americans weren't even aware of that fact and it was a wakeup call.

Not really, almost 20% of those 47% of those are retired people who have paid taxes throughout their lives and now are just living off their pensions and social security. Hence why using this statement actually does nothing more than kill almost 50% of the Republican voter base.

Facts? 

 

[lil black jean jacket]

=(

 

[cashbanks]

I normally dont give a damn about a presidential election but i don't want the boy Mitt anywhere near the white house

 

[o fenomeno]

47% of Americans pay no income tax. Damn. I'm from Canada but I see on the news that is cold truth. I'm sure many Americans weren't even aware of that fact and it was a wakeup call.

stick to canadian politics my man.

 

[deuce king]

This video is really worse with than I thought it was after listening to it entirely on Romney's end.

 

[playactionpass3]

this is why you vote people

 

[knightlovesqueen]

All I know is that in '08, McCain chose Sarah Palin over Mitt Romney as his running mate.
Sarah. Palin.
SARAH. PALIN.
That's all I need to know about Mitt Romney.

LOL those idiots chose Palin bc they wanted to raise their own minority. idiots.

"oh yall got a black guy... well here's an merican woman"

Then they started gassing the Indian governor or mayor.

Republicans can really be a joke.

No lie, how yall gonna peak at W.

He's the man compared to what they pubs have offered the last two elections

 

[af1 1982]

Even though he can be annoying at times, Putty dropped some good useful knowledge in here. Thank you good sir.

Also, good looks to all the dudes dropping knowledge in here. Seriously learning a lot.

 

[lyonbc1]

Lmao John Stewart's team are great...apparently Mitt's own mother admitted that his dad was on welfare for a couple yrs when he was starting out So Mitt couldn't even get his own father's vote based on his statements

I need to watch the entire video because this just keeps getting worse for dude....he also said they aren't using Ann much b.c they don't want people to become tired of her? Huh wtf? Dude was so much in his element, lookin like Mr. Burns in there...he was way more clear and direct than he EVER has been in front of a mic.....I'd rather have W back in office than give this dude the seat....and I'm sorta srs. At least W was a semi-lovable goffy rich dude who liked baseball, not a snobby uppity elitist

 

[essential1]

LOL those idiots chose Palin bc they wanted to raise their own minority. idiots.
"oh yall got a black guy... well here's an merican woman"
Then they started gassing the Indian governor or mayor.
Republicans can really be a joke.
No lie, how yall gonna peak at W.
He's the man compared to what they pubs have offered the last two elections

I remember that Bobby Jindal rebuttal after Obama's first address to Congress.. Was one of the funniest moments I've ever watched in politics.. To see someone being prepped for National Office chances just crash and burn in front of my eyes.

 

[essential1]

Obama just posted to FB & Twitter

 

[deleted]

Does anyone have any info on the Obama tape that The LA Times supposedly has?

EDIT: It's the same Khalidi tape...thought it was something different.

 

[futuremd]

Lmao John Stewart's team are great...apparently Mitt's own mother admitted that his dad was on welfare for a couple yrs when he was starting out

So Mitt couldn't even get his own father's vote based on his statements

I need to watch the entire video because this just keeps getting worse for dude....he also said they aren't using Ann much b.c they don't want people to become tired of her? Huh wtf? Dude was so much in his element, lookin like Mr. Burns in there...he was way more clear and direct than he EVER has been in front of a mic.....I'd rather have W back in office than give this dude the seat....and I'm sorta srs.

At least W was a semi-lovable goffy rich dude who liked baseball, not a snobby uppity elitist

Paul Ryan used his dad's Social Security money after he passed away to pay for college. 

 

[futuremd]

Romney has to score 81 points now...or something. 

 

[futuremd]

Man...why even try. 

[h1]Fox’s Eric Bolling Clarifies After Saying Obama Admin Answers To ‘Quran First’ And ‘Constitution Second’[/h1]
VIDEO

by Meenal Vamburkar  | 7:10 pm, September 17th, 2012

» 136 comments

Today on The Five, the crew discussed the anti-Islam film that has garnered widespread attention, particularly in light of anti-U.S. attacks and protests in the Middle East. Displeased with what he views as appeasement, Eric Bolling  said PresidentBarack Obama‘s administration “answers to the Quran first and to the Constitution second.”

Earlier in the segment, Greg Gutfeld  noted that “anti-Americanism” is born in universities and then bleeds elsewhere, such as into government. There’s nobody in the White House or in academia, he said, who thinks “our government is not at fault” — alluding to what many perceived as an American “apology” following the recent attacks.

Then, referring to a photograph of the filmmaker — who was in disguise and was interviewed by federal probation officers — Bolling remarked, “America changed at that moment. To use what is being called a flimsy ploy to bring this guy in for questioning…proves that the Obama administration, through all this appeasement and apologizing, answers to the Quran first and to the Constitution second.”

Fellow co-host Bob Beckel  immediately shot back, “That’s just an outrageous statement. Even for you, that’s an outrageous statement.” Pounding his fist on the table, he added, “That is the most — of all the things you’ve said, and I love you, brother, but that’s the most outrageous statement I’ve ever heard.”

The group then went back and forth discussing free speech, with Beckel saying such a video is a bad idea, and his colleagues asserting that while that may be, it’s perfectly within his rights.

Later, in the “One More Thing” segment, Bolling revisited his “Quran” comment, seeking to clarify:

What I meant was, rather than appeasing the Muslims, [President Obama] should worry about free speech first. That’s it. I’m done with, I don’t want to hear about it.

Watch Bolling’s remark followed by his clarification below, via Fox News: