06.19.12
The man who likes to fire people …
Nearly an hour after his “Every Town Counts” bus tour was scheduled to make a pit stop Saturday at a Quakertown-area Wawa — where dozens of protesters and prominent Democrats had set up camp — Mitt Romney finally pulled up and bought a sandwich.
At a different Wawa.
That left hundreds of people and dozens of protesters — including former Gov. Ed Rendell and former Democratic U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy — standing in vain at a Wawa off the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s Quakertown exit, waiting for a bus that was actually four miles away …
After ordering a meatball “sub” — whoops, make that a meatball “hoagie,” he corrected himself — Romney shook hands with the dozen or so customers who happened to be inside the store and had his picture taken with a group of boys from a local baseball team …
The crowd in the coal town was largely older, polite and sparing in ovations. Phil Jeffries, a funeral director from Weatherly, brought a camera and a concern for small businesses to the rally. A Republican who has voted Democratic before, he thinks Romney could clear the red tape that trips up entrepreneurs.
[It’s worth interjecting that funeral directors are not entrepreneurs in the sense of the discussion. They run depression and recession-proof “businesses.”]
Still two hours before Mitt Romney stood in front of a lone microphone atop a grassy mound just outside the entrance to historic Cornwall Iron Furnace on Saturday, the Burtko family of North Cornwall Township was bubbling over with excitement to see the Republican likely to face Barack Obama for the presidency in the fall.
“It’s not every day something like this happens,” Kelly Burtko said as her children, Emily, 9, and Zachary, 7, watched her mother answer questions.
Kelly’s husband, Barry, said he had heard George W. Bush speak near Wilkes-Barre in front of 20,000 people as he campaigned for a second term in 2004 …
Lebanon businessman Ed Kercher said he was “very impressed.” Romney was a more impressive speaker in person than the candidate he had watched on TV, he said.
“This is the most important election we’ve ever had coming up,” Kercher said.
The stories show what the expected — supporters, older, white and non-college educated Republicans who say they have voted Democratic, in the past. Such assertions are “likely stories,” not at all uncommon for interviews of this nature. It’s only human.
However, the next video — tipped to me at Pine View Farm — illustrates a Dem problem. Pale old white loser hacks, in this case ex-Ohio governor Ted Strickland, are the best to be found?
Young people wouldn’t listen to this guy. Older white people certainly didn’t. Strickland lost to Fox News celebrity and Bill O’Reilly stand-in John Kasich. And there’s no reason anyone else would, either.
The video is a grenade and the DNC never gets these slowly desiccating dog turds off the stage.
It’s painful to watch Strickland, who nobody knows — anyway, stutter his way through a poorly framed message, talking about saving the “auto industry in Ohio,” when everyone naturally thinks, “Detroit, Michigan.” You just have to ask yourself, “What’s wrong with the guy? Can he not even write and deliver one vigorous 90-second rebuttal?”
The answer is no, he can’t.
The party won’t field good people. The only inspirational man is the President and after that the talent goes shallow fast.
It’s one of the reasons, along with the reactionary vote that will hit him due to the disastrous economy in the last four years, I believe the president can easily lose to the unprincipled liar, the astonishingly unlikeable and impossible to admire (unless you’re just like him) person that is Mitt Romney.
Previously — on the shithat beat.