Salon.com > Tagg Romney

Report: Romney held off conceding until after Karl Rove’s meltdown

Mon, 24 Dec 2012 17:51:00 +0000

The Boston Globe reports that Mitt Romney held off on conceding the presidential race on Election Night during Karl Rove's infamous meltdown on Fox News over the returns in Ohio, and only made the call once Rove had been proven incorrect.

From The Globe:

Arriving at his suite in the Westin Boston Waterfront hotel, Romney received regular updates from his staff. He made small talk about the Patriots and the Celtics and played with his grandchildren. He was about to concede around 11:15 p.m when Republican strategist Karl Rove made his now-infamous appearance on Fox News Channel, insisting that his own network was wrong in calling Ohio for the president.

The concession call was canceled, followed by an hour of uncertainty. Then, after Fox executives dismissed Rove’s concerns and stood by the network’s projection, Romney said: Call the president.

Tagg Romney: Mitt had “no desire” to run

Sun, 23 Dec 2012 15:15:00 +0000

Just how bad was Mitt Romney's campaign? So bad that top Republican officials are now trying to "reverse engineer" his race to make sure no GOP candidate ever makes the same mistakes.

According to a behind-the-scenes story of the Romney campaign in today's Boston Globe -- by reporter Michael Kranish, who co-authored the biography "The Real Romney" -- Mitt's aides are still in disbelief over what hit them.

It describes a campaign that was deeply divided on whether to run on Romney's biography or on his business record. Ultimately, the paper reports, Romney sided with campaign manager Stuart Stevens rather than with the family members who wanted to stress his biography.

Among the revelations in the story:

* Romney's Ohio director had no idea what Obama's campaign was doing with all of its ground-game power. In a hilarious quote, Rich Beeson tells the paper: “Now I know what they were doing with all the staffs and offices. They were literally creating a one-to-one contact with voters.”

* Beeson wasn't the only mystified member of the team. The Globe reports that when Tagg Romney studied Obama's spending patterns, he "could not figure it out. Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries when he had no primary opponent? Only later did Tagg realize this was a key to Obama’s victory."

“We were looking at all the money they were spending in the primary and we were thinking ‘what are they spending all their money on? They’re wasting a lot of money.’ They weren’t," he told the Globe. "They were paying staffers in Florida.”

* Romney's campaign was caught flat-footed on social media. They wanted to build a Facebook app to locate voters who do not have landlines. They did not unveil it until three weeks before the campaign, and it was downloaded only 40,000 times. In contrast, Obama's had been released months earlier, and was downloaded some 1 million times. The project's coordinator tells the paper that the goal was: “Can we do 80 percent of what the Obama campaign is doing, in 20 percent of the time, at 10 percent of the cost?”

* Romney was still convinced he would win Ohio. Beeson, in late October, wrote a memo that "all but ridiculed the notion that the Republican presidential nominee, with his 'better ground game,' could lose." One problem, as the Globe notes: "But the claims proved wildly off the mark, a fact embarrassingly underscored when the high-tech voter turnout system that Romney himself called 'state of the art' crashed at the worst moment, on Election Day."

* And in perhaps the money quote of the whole piece, Tagg Romney tells the paper: “He wanted to be president less than anyone I’ve met in my life. He had no desire to . . . run."

5 signs racism still rules politics

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 16:50:00 +0000

The angry response to my Salon article last week on White Privilege was as swift as it was predictable. To sum up the wave of bigoted blowback in my email box and on my Twitter feed, the argument from denialists seems to be that race is no longer a factor in American politics, and that therefore, those who mention bigotry in the context of President Obama are, in the ugly retrograde vernacular of the 1980s, "race hustlers" engaging in an unseemly ploy to change the subject from the current administration's policies.

It's certainly true that bigotry is not automatically synonymous with criticism of the Obama record. For instance, many liberals (including me) who question the substantive gap between candidate Obama's policy promises and his policy record are not doing so out of any racial animus; they are doing so out of a sense of democratic citizenship. Similarly, many honest conservatives who oppose the Obama administration's civil liberties atrocities and Drug War are doing so on principle rather than because of prejudice.

Tagg Romney: Mr. White Privilege

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 17:35:00 +0000

Tagg Romney, grandson of George Romney, son of Mitt Romney, is the latest flesh-and-blood embodiment of White Privilege on the national presidential stage. Though that stage has historically been a catwalk for the whitest and most privileged in the world, Tagg is in a class few achieve. With his lineage and his inherited wealth he equals George W. Bush when it comes to getting advantages by virtue of nothing more than whose crotch he popped out of in the hospital delivery room.

Now, thanks to his comments yesterday, he has surpassed even Bush, becoming not just an image of White Privilege, but an example of how that privilege quietly operates in too much of America.

In a post-debate interview with a North Carolina radio station, Tagg was asked about his visceral reaction to President Obama, and he said his first thought was that he wanted to "jump out of your seat and you want to rush down to the stage and take a swing at him." He then laughed and added, "But you know you can't do that because, well, first because there's a lot of Secret Service between you and him."

Those bad, bad GOP boys

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 02:13:00 +0000

Mitt Romney's weird aggressiveness toward President Obama has been widely discussed since Tuesday's debate. He stalked him back to his chair a couple of times, told him, "You'll have your turn" and otherwise treated him in ways no one can remember a challenger treating a president. That's after his amped-up, periodically disrespectful first debate performance.

Romney's son Tagg took the innovative disrespect to another level Wednesday, telling a North Carolina interviewer that watching Obama call his father out over what I would call lies (but Obama never did) made him “wanna rush down to the debate stage and take a swing at him.” All that constrained him, said Tagg, was knowing that he was surrounded by Secret Service and also, that “this is just the nature of the process.”

I'm not someone who thinks the president can't be challenged, but I thought Romney reached a remarkable new high of disrespect Tuesday, after establishing an earlier benchmark in the Oct. 3 debate. Hearing his son Tagg say he wanted to "take a swing at him" makes me scratch my head and try to remember another presidential candidate's son – or daughter; let's not be sexist – expressing that kind of hostility toward a president. It just hasn't happened.