Rick Perry and Mitt Romney be warned: the talk about you is not favorable.
This blogger has, after five days of trying and now one week after my birthday, finally managed to score a flight from San Francisco to Chicago with the planned connection to Atlanta. But there’s one problem: the Atlanta flight from O’Hare was overbooked, I didn’t get on it, so I’m waiting to see if I get on the 9 AM flight. That afforded an extra bit of time to install this blog post, and reflect on the day from a political perspective.
(Oh, follow me on Tout: http://www.tout.com/u/zennie62)
To sum it up: there’s a lot of anger with Washington. But where there’s not anger, there’s a right winger on your United flight from San Francisco to Chicago who’s willing to tell you how they feel.
Yep. One white man who was about 85 literally cornered me as I was headed for the restroom and asked “Are you a Herman Cain supporter?” I said “No. I’m for Barack Obama.” But he was nice enough to speak with, and I remember to respect my elders, to I got a lot of information from him. He doesn’t care about the color of the person, he says, just where they stand.
I didn’t ask him about Mr. Cain’s explosive comments about Muslims, because I didn’t want to have a controversial conversation, but he continued to give the standard right-wing line. I then pulled out a piece of paper, wrote the equation GDP = C+I+G+E-iM, and explained it to him, and why it matters with respect to the economy and government spending. “Oh, nice math you got there.” He said. “It’s the economics you learned in school.” I retorted. He stopped in his tracks.
“I like to be intellectually challenged,” he said. That was awesome – major props to him.
Is Mitt That Flexible?
I wonder if presidential candidates like Texas Governor Rick Perry and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney are so flexible – right now, they’re the center of unfavorable comments.
In the case of Governor Romney, I found out about his campaign-sinking comment that “corporations are people too” from a man I was sitting across from at a bar here at O’Hare, and who played cornerback at Washington State until 2005. He said “Did you hear about Mitt Romney and his ‘corporations are people too’ comment? It’s all over the net.”
So, I searched “Mitt Romney” on Google using my iPhone and there it was. So I turned to YouTube and found, as of this writing, two videos of what I will call Mitt’s Metdown at the Iowa State Fair, at an event hosted by the Des Moines Register. Here’s one of them:
But it’s get better. Romney was owned by a heckler named Joe Fagan of Des Moines, who didn’t like Mitt’s seemingly anti-social security and medicare rant. This shouting match exploded:
From the reaction, it’s clear Mitt’s out of touch with the American people, not to mention unskilled with hecklers. But if Mitt’s out of touch, Governor Rick Perry may be down right scary to some.
Perhaps because I’m in what’s still Democratic country, Rick Perry’s announcement that he’s running for President impressed no one. In fact, a lot of people don’t know who Perry is, and that’s both good and bad – mostly bad.
You want to have some image with the electorate before you start out. I think Perry’s been in the big Texas bubble for so long, he makes the mistake common with Texans in that the state seems to play a bigger role in America to them than is true in reality.
This is going to be interesting.
Stay tuned.
Bill Carroll