Romney's hair was messy last night

Romney holds second disastrous press conference of the week



Last night Mitt Romney held a hastily called late-night press conference whose timing and execution felt like a panicked attempt at spin control. Romney tried to get out in front of the leaked video that has him deriding the 47% of America who, according to Romney will vote for Obama no matter what because they like being “dependent” on government and enjoy earning so little that they don’t qualify to pay income tax.

The press conference came less than a week after Romney’s last hastily called, defensive press conference. Last Tuesday he held one to address his ridiculous claim that Obama’s response to the embassy attacks in the Middle East was to “sympathize” with the attackers.

There is a precedent for calling press conferences at “oh shit” moments in your campaign, and using them as opportunities to pivot the dialogue to your advantage. Obama did this masterfully in 2008 when the Jeremiah Wright video flared up. He took a dialogue that started out with his former pastor saying “God damn America” and turned it into his “A more perfect union” speech that had the left and the right applauding him and taking a deeper look at race relations by the end of the press conference. Talk about a Houdini trick.

But in his last two press conferences, Romney has done nothing but grit his teeth and keep firing. Last week he repeated the misinformation that the president “apologizes” for being American. Last night he dug into boring details about how winning elections is all about capturing the small majority of voters who are actually maleable (a cynical truth we never really like to be reminded of) and repeated misinformation that the president’s approach to winning these voters was a “government-centric” vision for America, whatever that means, and that his is about “freedom” and “free market.” My best guess is that he was trying to fool people into forgetting the massive government investment in private markets known as TARP was enacted by Bush, not Obama—and that it actually worked, saving free markets rather than destroying them.

http://www.deathandtaxesmag.com/188644/romney-holds-second-disastrous-press-conference-of-the-week/