Mitt Romney’s Press Secretary Andrea Saul was hit with a biblical flood of conservative outrage yesterday, after she mentioned that the steelworker’s wife in the Priorities USA ad would have had health insurance under Romneycare if she had been living in Massachusetts. Calls for Saul’s firing (and eulogies for the Romney campaign) commenced immediately.
In an interview with Fox News Channel on Wednesday, Andrea Saul invoked Massachusetts’s expansion of health coverage as a defense to a harsh new ad funded by a super PAC supporting President Obama. In the spot, a former steelworker whose plant was closed by Bain Capital blames Romney, who co-founded the firm, for his family’s loss of health insurance and his wife’s subsequent death from cancer.
“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Saul said in the interview. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President Obama’s economy.”
Saul’s comment was accurate; the worker would have been insured under Romney’s plan. And as both TNR’s Noam Scheiber and TPM’s Benjy Sarlin have noted, her remark may not have been as off-message as it initially sounded.
That being said, this was still a serious misfire. The Obama campaign and Priorities USA are getting shredded in the media for the Joe Soptic ad. Conservatives are leaping to Romney’s defense. Why trample all that by reminding the right of the one issue that made them reluctant to support Romney in the first place?
Saul’s comment was also irrelevant. She didn’t need to debate the ad on its “merits.” Just point out what virtually every fact-checker has noted — that the story in the ad crumbles under scrutiny. Joe Soptic was laid off years after Romney left Bain; his wife continued to have health insurance through her own job; and his wife passed away five years after Soptic lost his job. There was absolutely no reason to inject Romneycare into the debate.
As many of us suspected would be the case, Romney's campaign was much tougher on their Repuplican primary opponents than they have been on Obama. n nIt is totally inexcusable to fail to hit such a prime slow pitch opportunity from Obama out of the park. n nThanks, RNC establishment (RNC-E). You never fail to let us down. n nThis is why the Tea Party is needed, why it took off as a grass-roots effort, and why it will continue to rise. n nIf the RNC does not drastically improve, the Tea Party WILL replace the GOP. n nThe average conservative voter is totally fed up with the moderate, wimpy, non-reponsiveness of the RNC-E to the constant progressive/democrat/MSM slander of our candidates, as well as with their failure to aggressively champion bed-rock conservative constitutional principles.
Barack Obama is black. The race card can therefore unfairly be used against Mitt Romney. He only ran against white guys during the primary. We do not live in a fair world.
I would say that it is waaay past time for the RNC-E, and the rest of the country included, to get over the race card being played. It's been maxed out. n nSimply look the race baiters in the eye, and say, "For pete's sake. Get a grip, quit whining, and argue the issues. Race should have no bearing on our policy decisions. Those decisions should stand on their own merits, as Martin Luther King dreamed that they would one day." n nYour reasoning is ANOTHER reason for the rise of the Tea Party. We're fed up with the fear of being called racists when we defend our principles. n nPrinciples are color-blind.
No, Barack Obama is HALF black — Allen West is ALL black and that is yet one more reason why Romney should pick West for VeeP. n nAllen West — was a black child living in inner-city Atlanta in the 1960s when we really had issues of racism that we didn't have 15 years later when Obama was smoking pot and raising Cain in Hawaii. A third generation military man who refers to folk like Emanuel Kant in speeches — how many others do this? n nIn picking West, Romney would be sending a clear signal to everyone — including those whom he really would like having support him. And as to the question on many minds – Israel – West makes a point about the US military that friends of Israel really need to think about — when asked if the US would help in Syria, West's response reportedly was "with what?" In a recent speech, West pointed out the rapidly declining number of ships in our Navy — and pointed out that we can't do things with military resources that we don't have.
um, calling Romney a murderer of women afflicted with cancer is not a race issue either way. this is sort of another instance of the elephant-and-the-Jewish-Question syndrome–but what the heck, why shouldn't this election be a referendum on whether nigras are just too damned uppity? Team O will happily pay your way on a national tour of protest.
Other than John Sununu, does the Romney campaign have one spokesperson capable of conducting an interview without putting his/her foot in his mouth? Once again, they seem more intent upon defending Massachussets Health Care than taking on Obama policies. For the last few years, we've had to endure Obama aides steeped in the thoroughly corrupt Chicago political culture. Now it seems, Romney's people are equally marinated in Massachussets liberalism.
This is absolutely horrendous. If Romney wants to win he had better start getting radical. Not only did she neutralize what would have been an opening against obama's despicable negative campaign, she actually tarred her own boss.
I watched Andrea Saul's interview on Fox News about the "Romney killed my wife" ad, and she was stumbling and inarticulate. A college intern would be expected to be more adroit at responding to the ad. The first attack point was, Romney has no sympathy for others, but the best response to that attack is simply to point out that Ann Romney has ALSO been diagnosed with cancer, in 2008. She is currently in remission, but the Romneys know what it is like to have your life threatened by a disease that does not care how poor or rich you are. n nThe second part of the ad's attack is the notion that somehow, being unemployed led to the man's wife's death from cancer. It would have been simple for Andrea to point out that, since the premise of the ad is that "unemployment gives people cancer", the massive unemployment that President Obama is responsible for should be considered a major threat to human health.
Again — the highly disciplined Allen West — and you just have to meet him to realize how highly disciplined he is — would be the ideal complement to Romney.
I would have loved to seen Allen West respond to the ad. I am not quite sure what he would have said, but the people who put that ad out would have regretted doing it. n nAnd as to Ann Romney — do not forget that her horse helped a lot — not with the cancer but the MS and but for the horse, would likely be in a wheelchair. Where are the people pointing this out – as well as the fact that the horse only cost a fraction of what John Kerry's boat did???
Boston's Howie Carr did a good take-down on this today, including a caller who pointed out that the man was wearing the SAME SHIRT in both the Obama and supposedly-unrelated other ad. n nSo, in other words, he is so poor he only owns one shirt… n nAnd Bain apparently kept the company going for 7 years before it went under on them, which means that, well, but for Bain, he would have been unemployed and without insurance seven years earlier. n nAnd then there are the Delco white-collar employees who are suing over Obama's Auto Bailout because they got badly screwed and apparently they just got a stack of quite incriminating Team Obama emails. Should be fun….
I think that Andrea Saul did not know the details of the steelworker's past and hence, she could not answer with the details that came out afterwards (Even Frank Luntz on Hannity thought the ad very strong in the beginning)in the research. That said, she was a terrible spokesperson and was not articulate or even cogent. Romneycare was totally irrelevant to the ad. She deserves to be fired. Finally, I still don't think that all these mini gaffes will make a difference. It is the economy,stupid!