Everybody who covers politics knows that the Romney campaign has an unusually good connection to the Drudge Report. Everybody probably realized that yesterday’s out-of-nowhere story about Condi Rice and the “veepstakes” – timed to coincide with Romney campaign fundraising e-mails about how he’d pick a nominee “between now and the convention” – was an obvious distraction. But who covered it that way?
Vogel and Friess file a must-read about how Steve Wynn became a Rove-verse donor. Reading stories like these, you start to wonder: When did Karl Rove become a compelling, charismatic figure who could ply checks from people like drawing milk from a jug? And then you realize that lots of rich people dislike Obama and don’t need that much prodding – just convincing that the money will be weaponized. Wynn’s a good example. From 2009:
Paul LePage won’t stop talking.
Jonathan Bernstein asks whether the weak GOP field failed to properly vet Romney.
Rick Santorum barely had a campaign. Newt? Sure, he was supported by anti-Bain Super PAC ads, but I don’t think he actually had much of a campaign, either. Herman Cain? Michele Bachmann? Ron Paul? Well, Paul did run some very effective attack ads (against Newt, if I recall correctly), but you didn’t really need very sophisticated research to come up with Newt and Nancy on the couch.
The GOP primary was actually the worst place to run Bain attacks on Romney, but both Gingrich and Santorum tried it – half-assedly, as pointed out here – and got more traction than anyone could have reasonably expected.
Dreaming of “Occupy” in the next Batman movie. Does no one remember the eerily prescient anti-Wall Street protests in Harold and Kumar’s 3-D Christmas?
And Gwen Ifill remembers when Ross Perot said “you people” from the NAACP stage.
