The Wall Street Journal, ever on the cutting edge of things that don’t involve walking over people to make money, discovers that our man Mitt! has dispatched his five Mittlings to the four corners of a country he wants treat like a dog strapped to the roof of a station wagon. It is in these bucolic locales that the boys are supposed to look pretty, but talk…not so much:
Politicians regularly ask for help from their offspring on the campaign trail, but Mr. Romney’s sons, ages 26 to 37, stand out in a crowded field. All five — Tagg, Matt, Josh, Ben and Craig — look like younger versions of their father. They are clean-cut, handsome and married. Four have children; three have degrees from Harvard Business School. Since February, they have appeared at roughly 400 events on behalf of their father, and he has consciously made them a central part of his stump pitch.
"We’re a multiplier effect," Tagg said from his office at the campaign’s Boston headquarters this week. "We’re able to be in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Michigan, Florida and Iowa all on the same day."
But having the sons on the trail is a double-edged sword. Campaign staffers have instructed them to avoid talking policy — though childhood tales do little to satisfy audience members looking for answers on specific issues. The inexperienced sons also lack their father’s polish, and occasionally their privileged upbringing inadvertently distances them from the voters they’re courting.
I guess the idea is to convey to the curious that Mitt! has raised five strapping young men (okay, four strapping young men and Craig) and if he can do that, why we’ll be right as rain. Unfortunately some of the locals didn’t get the memo and they keep asking the boys questions that are above the Mittling’s pay grade to answer:
Josh, a 32-year-old Salt Lake City real-estate developer, gives an abbreviated version of his father’s stump speech when he campaigns, peppered with tales from his childhood. The curveballs come during the question-and-answer sessions. When he attended a gathering of Hispanic and Asian Republicans in Las Vegas, Josh couldn’t answer a question about the number of minorities on the campaign staff. One of the hosts asked that next time he come better prepared. (He was able to win the crowd back with a karaoke rendition of "Sweet Caroline.")
Thank the Angel Moroni that there are still people in America who can still be dazzled by karaoke. Meanwhile things don’t go much better for baby Craig in Florida:
On a swing through Florida earlier this month, Craig, the youngest, made 18 stops over three days. He flipped flapjacks, fed a watermelon to a hippo and tried to familiarize tipsy folks at a beer tent with his father’s efforts. "Who the hell is he?" a woman behind the bar asked with a laugh when Craig, who as a Mormon abstains from alcohol, said his father was running for president. "No way!" another man accused, pressing Craig to present his driver’s license as proof.
Nearing the end of the third day, Craig sat hunched over at a Chili’s restaurant near Orlando next to Orange World — a giant building that is both the shape and the color of the fruit it champions. Waiting for his lunch to arrive, he confessed: "Part of me just wants this all to be over."
Don’t we all…




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Oh yea? Well, the Mittbots could kick yer ass in flag football. And at table etiquette.
I want the puppy that looks like Rory Calhoun.
I can’t imagine why Craig would want this to be over — I always figured Mormon Heaven would include lots of areas that resembled Chili’s in Orlando …
I’ve said from the moment he threw his cross in the ring, Mittmo will be the Repubelickins dude. It’s basically because he and “the fam” are good-looking and smooth talkers. Repubes lap that shit up with their pea-sized lizard brains. They can gloss over the Mormon “problem” by uniting around the bible. Nothing else matters to these dickweeds.
Ah fuck. A karoke of Sweet Caroline? Did the audience promise their votes if the MittSpawn would just shut the fuck up?
Woah, there, Bonkers. Expecting that the ‘religious right’ can get on board for the long term with a Mormon candidate underestimates the seething hatred among christian conservatives for, well, everyone who isn’t exactly like them. See the recent and otherwise inexplicable ascendancy of Mike Huckabee, whose name always reminds me of ‘I *Heart* Huckabees,’ which reminds me just how hot Naomi Watts is. Which is probably too much information.
Anyway, I’ve witnessed how evangelicals talk about ‘The Mormon Cult.’ It is so disrespectful, you’d think the religion proscribed raping babies as a core tenet of its worship.
“Fuckabees!”
Remember, TBogg, that if a MittSpawn heads down to San Diego, it’s part of the Final Plan: five Romney scions marking the points of a pentagram across the USA, with Pops in the middle.
At last! Always hated your old CSS but was kind enough not to mention it.
;”)
Yeah, but remember, they think Catholics are a cult, too (some believe the Pope is the Antichrist), but they managed to team up with conservative Catholics in ‘04 without too much trouble. It’ll be tougher if it’s the actual candidate, but as long as he hates brown people and wants to control everyone’s sex lives, he may get by.
Oh, yeah, trudat – the Bob Jones (there are multiple Bob Joneses in that family) who endorsed Mitt made orange Catholic basher Ian Paisley a prominent friend of his university. It was one of the things Bush got bashed for in ‘00 (along with the whole racism thing, which the current Jones in charge explains as a kindly and responsible policy reaction to one of their minority parents who was upset because her kid was dating someone white).
One of the things I find fascinating in this primary is the leaders who’ve been channeling all this bigotry conceding that they don’t care about their candidates’ moral purity as long as they can win, and the way their base is ignoring them and going for Huckabee.
Considering that one of Daddy Willard’s gubernatorial campaign ads had him talking about how *embarrassing* it was to show up for a date in the crappy *American-made* sportscar his father bought him for the great achievement of turning sixteen, how much more distant can the Mittlings be?
(Fck… even on a low-comment thread this worthless new Borgsite loads slower than the Pantload’s brain, has already crashed my system twice, and is now refusing to enable italics or the preview function. Thanks a whole bunch, ‘Firepups’!)
Not! Enough! Purpleeeeeee…………
Which of the Fab 5 did Mitt! make clean the dog shit off the back window? That’s the son who’s gonna break first.
Left out of the article was the moment when the temporarily-won-back crowd in Vegas turn on Josh:
Hey, wait a minute! “Sweet Caroline”? That song’s about a Kennedy! He’s singing about a Democrat! KILL HIM!!!!!
And then they ran Josh out of town.
We’re supposed to vote for Ball-Glove because he has nice kids? Funny, I don’t recall that being the Republican standard when the choice was between Gore’s hot accomplished daughters and Bush’s wayward drunken skanks. Hmmm. I guess 9/11 really did change everything.
Silly Cleter! Among the Talibangelicals, daughters don’t count except as “vessels” for the next generation of Strong Manly Sons. That’s why Jenna and Not-Jenna have never drawn the negative attention they’ve worked so hard to earn from their daddy’s most fervent supporters. Now if one of them had married a Staunch Young Repub whose opinions might actually matter, that might change a few votes… not necessarily for the better, which is why the wedding to the tobacco heir isn’t being front-paged by Dana Perrino.
To whom it may concern:
This is a test. Please ignore this. I’m just trying to see what kind of HTML skilz I have (next to none?) and tried to find the EPU end of a thread on which to test. So, these are irrelevant to this thread and relevant to the current thread…
ask and you shall receive
more Bolton mendacity
Thanks for your forbearance.
I think we can all now see just how right Daddy was when he compared his sons’ campaigning with serving in the armed services in Iraq.
Nice Young Frankenstein quote in there Tbogg; I guess you have to be may age to notice it.
The best part is Mitt’s spent about $50 million of the boy’s inheritance – and he’s getting his ass handed to him by the pudgy Elmer Gantry yokel.