My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.
2008-01-04
How Romney Should Approach New Hampshire and Michigan
For New Hampshire:
[split screen showing McCain and Romney]
John McCain and Mitt Romney.
McCain was educated at the United States Naval Academy; Romney at Brigham Young University and Harvard.
McCain served in the Navy from 1958 until 1981, including his famous and heroic interrment in a Vietnamese Prisoner of War Camp. In 1982, he entered politics by winning election as a Congressman from Arizona. In 1982 Romney was Vice President of Bain & Company, a major U.S. management consulting firm.
John McCain entered the U.S. Senate in 1986; in 1986, Mitt Romney had left his previous position to form his own equity investment firm--a firm that regularly doubled the value of its investors' money on an annual basis.
In 1990 John McCain was still a member of the Senate; Mitt Romney returned to Bain & Company to save it from bankruptcy without a single layoff.
In 1998 John McCain was elected to the Senate for a third term; in 1998, Mitt Romney was called on to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics from a $379 million deficit and a bribery scandal that threatened to cancel the Games.
In 2001 John McCain voted against the tax cuts President Bush asked for that pulled the conomy out of a shallow recession; in 2002 Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform act that limits political speech. In 2002, Mitt Romney presided over a spectacular Olympic Games which ended up $100 million in the black.
In 2003 McCain voted against the second set of tax cuts proposed by President Bush. In 2003 Romney took office as a Republican Governor of the very liberal state of Massachussetts.
In 2004 John McCain was elected to his fourth term as a Senator. In 2004 Mitt Romney was well on the way to turning a billion dollar state budget deficit into a surplus.
More recently, while John McCain was creating the so-called "Gang of Fourteen" Senators who were responsible for the dismissal of several Bush judicial nominations, Mitt Romney was enacting the most ambitious and innovative state health care plan in the country.
John McCain is an honorable man and a war hero. But is a man who has spent the last twenty years in the U.S. Senate the right man to bring change and innovation to a federal government that oes not work very well?
Mitt Romney: real-world experience, and a track record of impossible accomplishments.
Who would you rather have leading America into the future?
By the way, Rudy Giuliani could run a very similar ad against McCain.
If he ever gets in the game.
And then for Michigan I would think that a heavy emphasis on jobs creation, understanding how the economy works, and talking about innovation to strengthen the economy is the only way to go. McCain has no record on economics, and Michigan is in the throes of a horrible recession.
There's a chance to stop the McCain momentum. Not a great one, but a chance. | |
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