When Mitt Romney was a young man, his father gave him direct advice: “He said never get involved in politics if you have to win election to pay a mortgage,” Romney often says. “Financial independence was key.”
The son followed this advice so successfully that he made a fortune, retired in 1999, turned to public service and has never taken a salary since.
But the wealth intended to liberate Romney the politician instead has ensnared him. He hoped it would free him; for many voters, it now seems to define him.
Democrats have relentlessly cast him as a corporate raider and out-of-touch plutocrat. And Romney, after more than a year running for president, has made one comment after another that inadvertently reinforces those characterizations.
“Why don’t you stick up for yourself?” a high-dollar donor asked Romney at the private fundraiser that was secretly recorded and leaked this month. “To me, you should be so proud of your wealth. That’s what we all aspire to be. … Why not stick up for yourself and say, ‘Why is it bad to be, to aspire to be wealthy and successful?’ ”
Romney paused and launched into a two-minute description of what he tries to get across on the stump, “the fact that people who dream and achieve enormous success do not make us poorer — they make us better off.” But he never answered the question.
His oldest son, Tagg, offered one explanation for his father’s reticence in an interview Friday. “He was taught that when you do good things, you don’t brag about them.”
Three days before the first presidential debate, seen by some as Romney’s best or even last chance to sell himself, the persistent focus on his riches has taken a deep toll on his image, a battery of recent polls suggest.
By 2 to 1, registered voters in a late August Washington Post-ABC News poll said that Romney would do more to help the wealthy than the middle class. The numbers were flipped for President Barack Obama, with more than twice as many voters saying he would prioritize the middle class over the wealthy. In another measure of trust, registered voters in Ohio, Florida and Virginia gave Obama double-digit margins over Romney when asked which candidate understood the economic problems that Americans are facing, according to Post polls this month.
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Americans have elected many rich elites as president, starting with George Washington. But Romney’s wealth, estimated to be between $190 million and $250 million, is inextricably bound up with two cultures that are mysterious and misunderstood by many people: high finance and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He also has a complicated relationship with his own money, which he has been unwilling or unable to explain to the public. One day he says he won’t apologize for his success; another day he jokes before a roomful of donors that he’s “poor as a church mouse.”
In one year, he and his wife, Ann, gave away far more money — $4.2 million — than most Americans will earn in a lifetime, according to the 2011 tax return he filed two weeks ago. But he has resisted calls to release more tax returns, citing a wish to keep his charitable contributions private as one reason. “It’s a very personal thing between ourselves and our commitment to our God and to our church,” he told Parade magazine.
Staggering success and fear of failure; pride and modesty; high-ticket purchases and penny-pinching make-dos; generosity and penury all exist side by side in the way Mitt Romney regards his own stockpile of money, say friends, family and business associates.
His admirers long ago gave up getting Romney to talk unapologetically about his success or even to explain to voters why he struggles to connect.
“I think he genuinely is a modest person. That explains some awkwardness or apparent unease in dealing with it,” said Mark DeMoss, a senior adviser and prominent evangelical leader within the GOP.
“It’s difficult for him to understand why people would think of him not understanding their daily travails because of his enormous wealth,” said Douglas Gross, who chaired Romney’s 2008 campaign in Iowa but is not involved with his campaign now. Romney perceives that he’s “lived his own life in a way that’s not extravagant, [and so] he doesn’t understand why people wouldn’t think he understands their pain.”
Gross recalls confronting Romney directly on this gulf in their first meeting. “I asked him, ‘You’re an incredibly successful guy and can you relate to average folks in the cafes of Iowa?’ and he found that question insulting and refused to answer it. To me, that’s the microcosm of the problem.”
At most rallies these days, Romney’s appearance is preceded by a biographical video that depicts him as warm, frugal and a bit silly. And, Tagg Romney said, the campaign plans to air ads soon in which other people talk about the Mitt Romney they know.
It is not in his father’s temperament to “talk about how he cares about other people and cares for people,” Tagg Romney said. “He’s not going to change.”
This week, Mitt Romney tried once again to relate. “My heart aches for the people I’ve seen,” he told people at a rally in Westerville, Ohio, on Wednesday.
Later that day, asked in an NBC interview how he can “better connect with Americans,” Romney offered an accomplishment, rather than a declaration of his feelings — the universal health-care law that he signed as governor of Massachusetts.
“One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance,” he said of the law that was the model for Obama’s Affordable Care Act — which Romney has vowed to repeal.
“I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”
*
One of Romney’s sons, Josh, suggests that his father’s philosophy about his fortune is rooted in family history, a narrative of personal perseverance and persecution that also is the group history of the Mormons.
“It all stems from his father, who was born in 1907 in Mexico and lived in very poor circumstances, and had to flee Mexico, and was on government relief for a short time, and lived in Salt Lake through the Great Depression,” says Josh. “I think that experience for him and his family’s reaction … to that kind of circumstance really kind of shaped our family and my dad.”
What did it teach? “How to value money, how to value the dollar.”
Romney duct-tapes the holes in his gloves, duct-tapes the gap in his campaign bus ventilation system. He rinses and stacks the dishes at the sink before loading the dishwasher after family holiday meals. He picks up his own dry cleaning, pulls his own suitcase, eats at burger joints, counts his change.
While other rich people flaunt their acquisitions, the Romneys tend to flaunt their frugality. When another one of his sons fetched free wood pallets advertised on Craigslist, broke them down and used the discarded rough planks to repanel his “man cave,” his wife proudly chronicled the do-it-yourself project with photos and text on her blog.
“He’s probably the most frugal person I’ve ever met,” another Romney daughter-in-law, Laurie, said at a Women for Romney event in Lone Tree, Colo., 10 days ago. She joked that if you turned your back on a running faucet for a second, Mitt Romney would shut it off, that he consolidated the garbage “because the waste management company in his area charges by the bag.”
On the other side of this ledger are vast expenditures for family comfort.
His five sons are beneficiaries of a family trust valued at more than $100 million — as long as they keep working. “He’s said if you guys ever decide to stop working,” said Josh Romney, “you can guarantee you’ll never see another penny from the family.”
He’s spent millions updating and expanding the compound on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire into a family playground of horses and barns, powerboats and water toys. He’s seeking to triple the size of the couple’s $12 million San Diego beachfront home and include an underground garage with an elevator lift. He supports his wife’s passion for the expensive equestrian sport of dressage.
He has permitted himself one other great luxury: running for public office.
Romney has spent about $53 million of his own money on his campaigns, starting with his first bid, in 1994, to unseat Ted Kennedy as a Massachusetts senator. He spent $6 million to run for governor, $45 million on his 2008 presidential campaign and $150,000 this time around. It was money he earned as the co-founder and CEO of Bain Capital, a venture-capital firm that became spectacularly successful in creating wealth for investors.
His success with money, and his habits with it, have both expanded his world and narrowed his vision of how everybody else lives.
While he went to an elite private school and then Stanford and Harvard, and borrowed $42,000 from his father to buy his first house, in Belmont, Mass., he often describes himself as having “inherited nothing” because he and his wife gave away the money they received from their parents’ estates.
“Within Mormon culture, there is a strong egalitarian impulse,” said David Campbell, a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame and a Mormon who specializes in religion and politics. “There’s no paid clergy, so you might very well have someone who is a schoolteacher as the bishop and within the flock investment bankers and neurosurgeons, but he’s the pastor and in charge. Beyond that, there’s this ethos of people being not just frugal, but also using foresight in their planning.”
Within such an ethos, it might seem ordinary to suggest that a high school graduate should just borrow money from his parents to get on with life, as Romney did this spring during a campaign stop at Otterbein University in Ohio. “We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business,” Romney said.
The derision that greeted those remarks followed Romney all the way to Charlotte in September. There, delivering the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention, Julian Castro, the 37-year-old mayor of San Antonio, paid tribute to his single mother and the grandmother who arrived in Texas as a 6-year-old orphan, then repeated Romney’s words. “Gee,” said Castro, “why didn’t I think of that?”
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‘Mitt is a cheapskate,” says Fraser Bullock, lifelong friend, fellow Bain partner and fellow Mormon. “He watches every penny. This is in his DNA.”
When Romney goes to the movies, he pops a bag of his own popcorn at home, stuffs it into his wife’s purse and sneaks it into the movie theater so he doesn’t have to buy a snack he considers overpriced.
The candidate has thoroughly incorporated the modern instantaneous connectivity of his iPad into his now-frenetic life, but he downloads only free applications, friends say. He is so rigid about this that he continued to revise his speeches through a cumbersome process of text changes in e-mails, complaining all the while — but refusing to buy Apple’s Pages word-processing program because it costs $9.99. Finally, a senior staffer told an aide to buy it and download it onto Romney’s iPad when he wasn’t around.
Some might applaud Romney’s insistence on freeware as a harbinger of a president who would rein in spending and cut waste.
Others might question if that’s the best use of his high-priced time — and why he would not want to spend money on the entrepreneurs and creative minds who developed the product.
“He respects money very much, he is conscious of it, he wants to get maximum value out of it,” says Cindy Gillespie, whom Romney hired as the Washington-based lobbyist for the Salt Lake City Winter Games. “But at the same time, he is not in any way personally cheap.”
He gave her a tight budget for office space, “and I went thrifting and I found a great spot on Connecticut Avenue between Burrito Brothers and Bubbles Hair Salon in a third-floor walk-up,” she says, which she furnished with beat-up discards from the General Services Administration. “The place was awful, but he loved it.”
Earlier in the campaign, before he received Secret Service protection this year and began using a chartered plane on the campaign, Romney flew coach and even refused to pay the $10 to Southwest Airlines to earn early boarding. But he had no objections to letting one of his top strategists buy a better boarding position — and expense it.
He has a taste for both fine French restaurants and neighborhood ethnic joints, and he tips well at both, say those who have served him and dined with him.
But he carries his own bags — no tip for the bellman there — and washes his dress shirts in the hotel room sink at night and irons them in the morning.
Josh Romney remembers his parents getting an estimate to repair a sunken brick walkway between the garage and the house shortly after the family moved, in 1989, to their seven-bedroom Belmont home. Romney was a newly rich man; Bain Capital had completed its first two takeovers, making its partners millionaires nearly overnight.
“I remember my mom and dad being flabbergasted at the price. They just couldn’t believe it. They just said that’s way too expensive,” says Josh, who was 15. “So my dad enlisted me and said, Josh, we can do this way cheaper than that. We went and got the brick and sand and dug the area out and we spent every Saturday for the next few months building that brick walkway and actually did a pretty remarkable job. It’s still standing today and doing quite well…. Here’s a guy that at that time was making a pretty good living in the business world and easily could have paid for it, but just couldn’t bring himself to waste that kind of money.”
Says a political adviser who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk frankly about Romney’s habits: “I watched him go into an outdoor cafe in Santa Monica once and a guy at the table ordered a Perrier off the menu and Romney looked at the price and said, no, no don’t do that, walked across the street to the 7-Eleven and bought a six-pack of Perrier and said, let’s just drink this. He is frugal to the extreme. It’s a joke within the campaign. It kills everybody that’s been around him.”
The emphasis he places on doing it cheaper himself could frustrate those doing business with him, however.
Geoffrey S. Rehnert, one of Romney’s original partners at Bain, cites the hiring meeting for a new chief executive for Calumet Coach, a medical equipment company that was one of Bain’s first acquisitions in 1986. When the recruiter put the salary demands for the top candidate on the table, Rehnert says he thought “Mitt was ready to throw up.”
In hindsight, the candidate’s request was within the industry standards at the time — and Bain would go to reap $34 million on its initial $1 million investment — “but Mitt was just so pained” to pay the sum, Rehnert says. “The executive-search guy looked at him and said, ‘Mitt, you throw nickels around like they’re manhole covers.’ ”
*
The story of the Romney family is both more wretched and more resilient than many people know.
For most of their five generations in this country, the Romneys were both the seekers and the hunted, often at the same time.
They became ardent leaders of an upstart religion that led them in ox-drawn wagons through a wild West to a valley by a lake of salt. At each place they alighted, the Mormons bent their shoulders to the wheel and prospered, thus provoking the envy, suspicion and hatred of their countrymen.
Several times, the Romneys were chased from their settlements by mobs with fiery torches and the slightly more civilized uniforms of the federal government, which periodically throughout the mid-1800s outlawed their religion for practicing polygamy.
George Romney, Mitt’s father, was born into prosperity on a thriving ranch his grandfather coaxed from dirt in Mexico, where he had fled with his three wives after a mob came to kill him at the Mormon settlement he had founded in Arizona.
When the Mexican revolution broke out, the Romneys fled back to the United States, penniless. George Romney was 5 at the time, and he remained bitter all his life about the exile, describing his family as among “the first displaced persons of the 20th century.”
Like his forebears, George’s father would go “broke five times,” as Mitt Romney’s older brother, Scott, describes it. George Romney himself sold paint out of the back of his car, his son has taken to saying on the stump, to keep his own young family afloat.
Mitt Romney always seems to have kept score with dollar signs.
Asked to declare which baseball team he followed earlier this year during an interview with Michigan’s Grand Rapids Press, Romney said this:
“Oh, Red Sox, I’m afraid. I grew up a Tigers fan, of course, and Al Kaline was my hero. I remember one game, we were at Tigers Stadium …and the guy in the next box was cheering ‘Mickey Mantle, Mickey Mantle, he’s our million-dollar player, he’s our million-dollar player.’ We were playing the Yankees, of course. And then Roger Maris came up and ‘Roger Maris, he’s our million-dollar player.’ Then when Al Kaline came up I said, ‘Al Kaline, he’s our five-million-dollar player.’ Of course, today that would seem like small money, but not back then. But I was about 10, and I was very irritated with the Yankees.”
This is an unusual anecdote for a presidential candidate to offer up about himself 55 years later. And it’s inflated: Nobody made millions in baseball in the late 1950s. It seems to illustrate that even as a child, Romney used money to calibrate value.
He didn’t manage to defeat Ted Kennedy in their Senate race, but for years he has bragged that he got close enough to force Kennedy to “take out a second mortgage” to pour money into his campaign.
The repeated inability to keep himself from sounding superior comes from “a grinding obsessive quality to make himself appear to be more perfect than he needs to be and more perfect than he is,” suggests Ronald Scott, a former Time reporter who is a distant cousin of Romney’s and has known him for years through church. At the same time, Romney refuses to acknowledge that his money and his almost prim attitude toward it create a distance with voters.
And while he was born long after his father’s paint-selling days, Romney made it clear at that fundraiser caught on tape in Boca Raton, Fla., that he actually sees himself as self-made as his father, saying that even though his and his wife’s fathers “did quite well,” when they “passed along inheritances to Ann and to me, we both decided to give it all away. So, I had inherited nothing. Everything that Ann and I have, we earned the old-fashioned way, and that’s by hard work.”
The crowd applauded. He added: “I say that because there’s the percent that’s, ‘Oh, you were born with a silver spoon.’ You know, ‘You never had to earn anything,’ and so forth. And, and frankly, I was born with a silver spoon, which is the greatest gift you could have, which is to get born in America.”
Scott Clement and Jason Horowitz contributed to this report.
First off the article was written by the Washington Post so everyone needs to know the headline is going to be negative toward Mitt Romney. After reading the article I admire Mitt even more. Most of us are not as ambitious as him. We want money, but we don’t want to have to work for it and who among us would give away an inheritance to charity?
Mitt Romney is the person we need as president right now. He is an example to ALL of us on how we should live our lives, no matter what our race or religion is.
So Mitt isn’t struggling to connect with voters? Quit screaming that your side is being victimized. There are truths here and the truth in this situation is that many voters don’t feel they connect with Mitt.
Few of us have a dancing horse, car elevators and are updating multiple mansions. Mitt is a charade of contradictions.
So you only read the headline? How diligent and informed you are.
ambitious as in robbing peoples pension funds and then outsourcing their jobs to china…to line his own pockets (and that of bain capital)?…plenty of people donate the same percentage mitt does to charity. what percent is 4.15 million of 250 million? doesn’t sound like such a big deal when you say it that way. and i am glad he could afford to give away his inheritance…but it certainly has not helped him to understand that most of us cannot…in fact, most of us aren’t getting any inheritance thanks to the health care system which confiscates all you have worked for if you happen to get sick late in life.
You must think Katharine Graham still runs the Post. George Will, Marc Thiessen, Robert Kagan, Robert Samuelson, Michael Gerson, and Charles Krauthammer all write for the Post. It’s not as conservative as the Washington Times, but what paper is?
Multiple MacMansions, a stable full of horses, a fleet of Cadillacs… — that’s frugal? No wonder there’s a disconnect.
Golly!
A presidential canidate that has actually done something besides organizing the community.
How refreshing.
Romney/Ryan 2012
The only thing that Romney organized is his “OWN” private Swiss Bank Account!
LOL
Obama ! 2012
You can’t argue with success.
and please tell us what Obama has actually done, EVER, that makes him remotely qualified to be president? Voting for Obama in 2008 was insanity, now he has proven to be nothing but talk, and you would vote for him again?…………….no wonder this country is in the shape it is.
Had Bin laden killed, increased jobs every month since he’s taken office, made health care affordable for millions, ended one of the two wars that drunk cowboy started, made returning vets lives better, saved the auto industry, got the consumer protection agency up and going, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and will prove Mitch McConnell, that loser fool, wrong by being elected again. And what have the wingnuts done to better this country in the past four years …. NOTHING a big fat ZERO. They are traitors and should be in jail.
He didn’t do that.
Though the article and friends calls Romney frugal when dealing with personal purchases, two other ways to view this behavioral malady is “penny wise and dollar foolish” or it’s the “it’s my money and no one else is getting it syndrome.” Regardless of his tight fist depression era mentality Mitt just wasted a total of $53 million in his bid for president, a position in life all the money in the world won’t buy him, …. EVAH.
Yeah, its his money and nobody is getting it…..except for the millions he pays in taxes.
You can keep deluding yourself into somehow thinking Obama is qualified to be president (and delude yourself even more into thinking he deserves 4 more years), the rest of us will vote for Mitt (and not that he is my perfect candidate by any means, but compared to Obama, this is the no brainer of of the century).
And you delude yourself thinking Romney and Ryan will do anything different then that drunk cowboy. They’ll be using the same ex-Bush losers that got us into this mess and will continue to do the same things that damn neared destroyed this country four years ago. Not only is this crew deluding themselves but are proving themselves insane by repeating the same crap and expecting a different result ….. that’s clinical insanity, that’s truly a no-brainer.
As far as taxes go we still don’t know what the total nut is he’s off shored, though legal not real patriotic, but consider the source neither is sending jobs to China and robbing folks of their pensions and pocketing it for his very own profit.
No. Running up the deficit is unpatriotic. Remember? At least it was when B. Hussein. O said it before he was elected. He has proceeded to run up the deficit at a rate that makes Bush look like an unranked amateur. Do you pay what is due when you fill out your tax forms or do you check the balance in your savings and investments and total it all up and just send it in? If you pay what is due then you are “not real patriotic” right? What a joke! That is the thing about the left. First it was Crazy Harry who heard “voices” that told him that Romney paid NO taxes for more than ten years. Then when his taxes were released the lamestream media went all crazy saying he paid too much just to make it look good. There is no way that Romney and Ryan could possibly do any worse than Jimmy Obama has done and he says he needs “more time” to do more. Clinton said at the convention that no president could possibly have done better having inherited the mess that Barry did. Well, whoever the next president is will inherit a much worse situation. What will the excuse be then? Scary.
So Bush wasn’t a patriot? I’d agree with that I’d say he was more of a parrot. I kind of feel sorry for you guys … well not too much. Harry, what have the extreme right done for this country in the past 12 years except try to stop folks from voting, cry whine and bully. They’re a bunch of traitors to our country, there is absolutely nothing you can point to that they have done for the betterment of the entire country in that time frame. We will see after November just how pseudo-patriotic the extreme wing bunch is. They will be unable to except the vote of the majority and continue to cry, whine and bully. Even after having their political legs cut off at the knees they will continue on their misguided path which is their vision of what they what our country to be. Even after being rejected as totally unpalatable and pathetic they will steer their clown car down the wrong lane of the road till they’ve worn the tires off only to continue on the wheel rims till they steer their silly car off the road into the ditch one more time. It won’t end there, after ditching their clown car they will smash out the windows, light it on fire, collect the insurance and blame the accident on some poor slob passing by. That’s what rightwing USA will look like.
Bush wasn’t a patriot by Barrys definition not mine which makes Barry ten times worse by his own standard. He took the preverbial “clown car” that was in a ditch and drove it over a cliff at warp speed. Can you name anything in the past four years that he and the left has done? He still blames Bush at every turn. If reelected who will he blame then? He takes no responsibility for ANYTHING….especially dead ambassadors. Four more years of this bunch and there won’t be a country left to save.
1. Ordered all federal agencies to undertake a study and make recommendations for ways to cut spending
2. Ordered a review of all federal operations to identify and cut wasteful spending and practices
3. Instituted enforcement for equal pay for women
4. Beginning the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq
5. Families of fallen soldiers have expenses covered to be on hand when the body arrives at Dover AFB
6 Ended media blackout on war casualties; reporting full information
7. Ended media blackout on covering the return of fallen soldiers to Dover AFB; the media is now permitted to do so pending adherence to respectful rules and approval of fallen soldier’s family
8. The White House and federal government are respecting the Freedom of Information Act
9. Instructed all federal agencies to promote openness and transparency as much as possible
10. Limits on lobbyist’s access to the White House
11. Limits on White House aides working for lobbyists after their tenure in the administration
12. Ended the previous stop-loss policy that kept soldiers in Iraq/Afghanistan longer than their enlistment date
13. Phasing out the expensive F-22 war plane and other outdated weapons systems, which weren’t even used or needed in Iraq/Afghanistan
14. Removed restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research
15. Federal support for stem-cell and new biomedical research
16. New federal funding for science and research labs
17. States are permitted to enact federal fuel efficiency standards above federal standards
18. Increased infrastructure spending (roads, bridges, power plants) after years of neglect
19. Funds for high-speed, broadband Internet access to K-12 schools
20. New funds for school construction
21 The prison at Guantanamo Bay is being phased out
22. US Auto industry rescue plan
23. Housing rescue plan
24. $789 billion economic stimulus plan
25. The public can meet with federal housing insurers to refinance (the new plan can be completed in one day) a mortgage if they are having trouble paying
26. US financial and banking rescue plan
27. The secret detention facilities in Eastern Europe and elsewhere are being closed
28. Ended the previous policy; the US now has a no torture policy and is in compliance with theGeneva Convention standards
29. Better body armor is now being provided to our troops
30. The missile defense program is being cut by $1.4 billion in 2010
31. Restarted the nuclear nonproliferation talks and building back up the nuclear inspection infrastructure/protocols
32. Reengaged in the treaties/agreements to protect the Antarctic
33. Reengaged in the agreements/talks on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions
34. Visited more countries and met with more world leaders than any president in his first six months in office
35. Successful release of US captain held bySomali pirates; authorized the SEALS to do their job
36. US Navy increasing patrols off Somali coast
37. Attractive tax write-offs for those who buy hybrid automobiles
38. Cash for clunkers program offers vouchers to trade in fuel inefficient, polluting old cars for new cars; stimulated auto sales
39. Announced plans to purchase fuel efficient American-made fleet for the federal government
40. Expanded the SCHIP program to cover health care for 4 million more children
41. Signed national service legislation; expandednational youth service program
42. Instituted a new policy on Cuba, allowing Cuban families to return home to visit loved ones
43. Ended the previous policy of not regulating and labeling carbon dioxide emissions
44. Expanding vaccination programs
45. Immediate and efficient response to the floods in North Dakota and other natural disasters
46. Closed offshore tax safe havens
47. Negotiated deal with Swiss banks to permit US government to gain access to records of tax evaders and criminals
48. Ended the previous policy of offering tax benefits to corporations who outsource American jobs; the new policy is to promote in-sourcing to bring jobs back
49.. Ended the previous practice of protecting credit card companies; in place of it are new consumer protections from credit card industry’s predatory practices
50. Energy producing plants must begin preparing to produce 15% of their energy from renewable sources
51. Lower drug costs for seniors
52. Ended the previous practice of forbidding Medicare from negotiating with drug manufacturers for cheaper drugs; the federal government is now realizing hundreds of millions in savings
53. Increasing pay and benefits for military personnel
54. Improved housing for military personnel
55. Initiating a new policy to promote federal hiring of military spouses
56. Improved conditions at Walter Reed Military Hospital and other military hospitals
57 Increasing student loans
58. Increasing opportunities in AmeriCorps program
59. Sent envoys to Middle East and other parts of the world that had been neglected for years; reengaging in multilateral and bilateral talks and diplomacy
60. Established a new cyber security office
61. Beginning the process of reforming and restructuring the military 20 years after the Cold War to a more modern fighting force; this includes new procurement policies, increasing size of military, new technology and cyber units and operations, etc.
62. Ended previous policy of awarding no-bid defense contracts
63. Ordered a review of hurricane and natural disaster preparedness
64. Established a National Performance Officer charged with saving the federal government money and making federal operations more efficient
65. Students struggling to make college loan payments can have their loans refinanced
66. Improving benefits for veterans
67. Many more press conferences and town halls and much more media access than previous administration
68. Instituted a new focus on mortgage fraud
69. The FDA is now regulating tobacco
70. Ended previous policy of cutting the FDA and circumventing FDA rules
71. Ended previous practice of having White House aides rewrite scientific and environmental rules, regulations, and reports
72. Authorized discussions with North Korea and private mission by Pres. Bill Clinton to secure the release of two Americans held in prisons
73. Authorized discussions with Myanmar and mission by Sen. Jim Web to secure the release of an American held captive
74. Making more loans available to small businesses
75. Established independent commission to make recommendations on slowing the costs of Medicare
76. Appointment of first Latina to the Supreme Court
77. Authorized construction/opening of additional health centers to care for veterans
78. Limited salaries of senior White House aides; cut to $100,000
79. Renewed loan guarantees for Israel
80. Changed the failing/status quo military command in Afghanistan
81. Deployed additional troops to Afghanistan
82. New Afghan War policy that limits aerial bombing and prioritizes aid, development of infrastructure, diplomacy, and good government practices by Afghans
83. Announced the long-term development of a national energy grid with renewable sources and cleaner, efficient energy production
84. Returned money authorized for refurbishment of White House offices and private living quarters
85. Paid for redecoration of White House living quarters out of his own pocket
86. Held first Seder in White House
87. Attempting to reform the nation’s healthcare system which is the most expensive in the world yet leaves almost 50 million without health insurance and millions more under insured
88. Has put the ball in play for comprehensive immigration reform
89. Has announced his intention to push for energy reform
90. Has announced his intention to push for education reform
I don’t have time to cut and paste a rebuke to this stuff. Have you read it? Wow! It sure points out how much he actually hasn’t accomplished. Nice list though.
All you need to know Harry is this coming election is going to be a terrible defeat for team extreme, worse then today’s Pats game with Buffalo.
The prison at Guantanamo may be phasing out, but indefinite military detention sure ain’t
All you can come up with is 1 out of 90? That average won’t even keep you in the minor leagues.
As Walter Sobchak would say:
Am I wrong Donny?
Et cetera
91. Added $6 trillion to our national debt
92. Resigned our children and grandchildren to a life of servitude to pay for the elderly
93. Doubled the price of gas and increased our dependence on foreign oil
94. Authorized use of drones to kill with no due process
95. Created a new health care entitlement which is paid for by taxing the middle class while letting 60 million have it for free
96. Increased the cost of health insurance
97. Reduced our access to health care
You and I have virulently disagreed on almost every issue, but I could not agree more with you on #94. With the ensuing “collateral damage” and coupled with indefinite military detention, it’s an Al-Quaeda recruitment tool and a sign of an imperial presidency. The only problem is that Obama and almost every other candidate seems fine with it, except maybe Ron Paul and Rocky Anderson. Only occasionaly does the media investigate and question bad ideas supported by both candidates. This should be one of them. “Reforming Social Secuirty and Medicare” should be another, but then we probably get back to our virulent disagreements.
If you agree with those, then we probably also agree on these:
98. Expanded warrant-less wiretapping.
99. Provided guns to Mexican drug cartels and then lied about the program
100. Misled the American people about the Sept. 11 attack on the Libyan embassy
Agree on #98. Issues like this go beyond this election. Obama has continued and/or expanded some of the most egregious civil liberties violations from the Bush administration. The problem, as with the drone assasinations and indefinite military detention, is that once he signed off on these GOP policies all debate on them ceased. The real kicker is that the media is far too concerned with horse race nonsense to admit that both parties may be fundamentally wrong on an issue. If both party leaders agree, it’s no longer an issue. This was very evident in the GOP primaries when Ron Paul attempted to bring up the War that shall not be named. It’s nearly Orwellian that these issues are so rarely discussed.
Not buying it. You’ll spend millions to update one of your multiple homes, but you won’t pay for a word processing application? Just more dishonesty from this guy. It’s just like now all of a sudden he’s trying to portray himself as a compassionate conservative.
WoW!
What a legacy!
Thrown out of the US only to Be Thrown Out of Mexico!!!!!!!!!!
It’s NO wonder the poor kid is a Flip –Flopper!
It’s learned Survival Tactic!
” George Romney, Mitt’s father, was born into prosperity on a thriving ranch his grandfather coaxed from dirt in Mexico, where he had fled with his three wives after a mob came to kill him at the Mormon settlement he had founded in Arizona.When the Mexican revolution broke out, the Romneys fled back to the United States, penniless. George Romney was 5 at the time, and he remained bitter all his life about the exile, describing his family as among “the first displaced persons of the 20th century.” “
The more that I think about this flip flopper and the “three wife” thing the more it makes sence!
Can you Imagine the Difficulty keeping lies straight to “Three Wives” !
“When Romney goes to the movies, he pops a bag of his own popcorn at home, stuffs it into his wife’s purse and sneaks it into the movie theater so he doesn’t have to buy a snack he considers overpriced.”
Some might applaud Romney’s insistence on freeware as a harbinger of a president who would rein in spending and cut waste.
Hey! Mitt!
Vote for Obama if you want Free Stuff!
“I watched him go into an outdoor cafe in Santa Monica once and a guy at the table ordered a Perrier off the menu and Romney looked at the price and said, no, no don’t do that, walked across the street to the 7-Eleven and bought a six-pack of Perrier and said, let’s just drink this. He is frugal to the extreme. It’s a joke within the campaign. It kills everybody that’s been around him.”
The idea of bringing your own food and drink into a restaurant, even one that has outdoor seating, and using their table to eat at, occupying a seat there that could be used by a paying customer, is so unbelievably rude, that it borders on sociopathic.
I’m sure the wait staff and owner of the restaurant just thought this was precious!
and the server who makes a percentage of the bill (usually 15%). even out to lunch he has no regard for the working american.
Your reaction to this anecdote explains why our country is in a dire situation. This is truly the thinking of liberals. They no longer care how much something costs.
“And, and frankly, I was born with a silver spoon”
Therein lies the rub, mouth full of silver spoon leaves little room to taste anything else except heavy metal, quite possibly the only taste he has.
At least he was born in America with a silver spoon in his mouth AND he appreciates it. Now that’s refreshing.
Are you sure about that Harry? I haven’t seen his birth certificate, anyone else seen Romney’s birth certificate? I bet it’s fake if he has one. Further more Harry if corporations are people they better produce a valid birth certificate as well. Time to belly up to the table with the goods, time to put up or shut up. Prepare Harry for the worst defeat in political history of this country. The Republicans or what ever name they go by these days have been tried and found wanting.
You and the lamestream media have forgotten about the 2010 election. Remember that? Remember Jimmy Carter? Obama loves Jimmy because he was the worst president ever….until Obama. And you might not have seen Romney’s birth certificate yet but you will never see Barry’s. Not the real one at least. Keep believing those polls and the syrup that the media is putting in your kool aid. You will be the one disappointed in November. Can’t wait to hear the explanations from the pundits on this one.
2010? ….. is that when a bunch of skin heads slid into office? 2010 is a crap stain on our political system, you had your two years…. now watch in horror as that crew of flim-flam artists gets their keisters kicked this go around. Harry the majority of people are sick of their crap …. stick a fork in them cuz they’re done.
You need to turn off MSNBC and read more.
If you’re still on Team Birther, reason is not your strong suit.
Oh the trails and tribulations of being born into wealth and privilege! Poor Mitt, all that money still can’t buy you a personality.
while Obama would rather go on the View or Letterman than deal with issues involving this country. Yeah, Mitt is a little stiff, but Obama has no substance……all talk and nothing else.
Why don’t you expound on exactly that Mitten’s plans are for this country ….. how about some detail, if there is there any? How bout you fill us in since you seem to have the inside track on the Romney plan? ….. We all know it’s the same tired crap that put us in the position we where in four years. Wingnuts have done nothing for this country in the past 12 years except, cry whine and bully.
Rommey does not even have that. Every time he talks, he digs himself in deeper.
We don’t need a ‘movie-star personality’ in the White House like the one we have now. We need someone who actually knows how to function as an executive, as in Chief Executive!
Who do you have in mind? Romney sure doesn’t qualify, nor do any of the other clowns he ran against.
Someone who would bring his own refreshments to a movie or a restaurant sure sounds like the kind of guy who would put his money into creating jobs. Giving tax cuts to the wealthy so they can invest in the economy and create jobs has been shown not to work. Romney and his ilk invest in companies to get tax benefits while looting the pension plans and then sending the jobs overseas. Another in the long line of Republicans who look out for their wealthy friends to the detriment of everyone else.
On another note, Santorum calling for Repiblicans to rally behind Akin because control of the house is more important than having someone who can actually think in a lucid way. The Republicans deserve all the criticism being leveled at them from the leftists and the centrists. Extreme policies do not favor most of the citizenry; they favor the few.
Romney should just sit around collecting welfare while using his Obama phone.
There’s nothing quite as pathetic and sad as a frugal rich man who can’t buy an election. Maybe if the election is close Mitt will get lucky and be appointed by the Supreme Court and be the second president to hold office who was not elected. Who cares about voters when your real constituents are boaters and the Supreme Court.
Did anyone ever begrudge the Kennedy clan their wealth, even though it was gotten by a large extent through illegal activity (bootlegging)? Did anyone question their investments? Do you really think they did not have offshore bank accounts? Get real. Mitt Romney earned his money and can spend it any way he wants to. There is nothing unusual about a person being frugal in some areas and willing to spend more on other things. There aren’t too many people who wouldn’t like to be wealthy – just look at the number of folks who play the lottery. It’s part of the American dream & should not in any way disqualify a person or cause people to question the values of someone who is rich.
mitt romney made his millions with bain capital…on the backs of millions of working americans, by out-sourcing their jobs. i’ll take the bootleggers any day.
Guess you must really be pissed off that Obama has also outsourced jobs.
Stupid is as stupid does, and that is what the liberal followers are. They have no idea of the business acumen of this man Romney and the fact that he has worked to be independently wealthy, unlike the career politicians Joe Biden and Al Gore who gave a pittance of their acquired while in the Congress wealth to charity. Mitt Romney gave over $4.5 million in 2011 alone. Common sense has left most Americans and those in Ohio who were the recipients of Obama’s 1 million phone giveaway see this as a sure vote for him.
And blind arrogance is no excuse for believing someone will be a successful politician just because they’re successful in business. To many who stand on the far right conflate these two occupations that are in diametric opposition. The politician serves others over the interest of the dollar, and on the other hand the CEO serves the financial interests of the business or it’s board of directors. Apparently being extremely Right doesn’t make you any smahter than those that you consider beneath your self inflated self. If Romney possesses such outstanding business acumen, why then is his campaign such a complete disaster?
ROMNEY / RYAN 2012 !!!!!
At least he’s a life-long Yankee hater. That’s about the only thing about him I can agree with.
LOL …. that evil empire. What about the height of trees in Michigan? I kind of agree with him on that point, though I prefer the height of the trees in Maine.
Biased and left leaning, Ann Gerhart, Philip Rucker, The Washington Post and BDN Struggles to make sense of the last four years.
And the eight miserable years before that …… best to use a weegie board for answers.
It’s a sad day when Americans show contempt instead of admiration for those who have been successful. It is a sadder day when they vote to punish that success rather than voting for who would help revive our economy and create jobs.