A couple of videos, bundled together: we had both RNC Co-chair Sharon Day and RNC Chair Reince Priebus speaking at the RedState Gathering. Both took a moment to speak to me later:
Sharon Day
Reince Priebus
By the way: I am not claiming that Reince was energized enough by the RedState Gathering to go out the next day to the Sunday morning talk shows and Smite the foe. But neither am I ruling it out, either.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
I laughed like a loon when I finally figured out what was tickling me about this – quite good – RNC print ad (H/T Jim Geraghty): I knew that they had gotten a line in that from somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. And then it hit me:
Pete Seeger.
Well, I guess that this week is going to suck for Barack Obama, too. $71 million to Romney/RNC’s $106 million, apparently:
For the second month in a row, President Barack Obama’s vaunted fundraising operation fell to Mitt Romney’s, as the president was outraised by about $35 million in June.
Obama’s been having a lot of bad weeks lately. Of course, we don’t know the Cash On Hand numbers, yet. And we’re not going to know them for a while yet, because President Burn Rate probably doesn’t really feel like bringing that particular bit of embarrassing campaign detail front and center…
Via @RyanGOP.
Moe Lane
Commendably fast of the RNC:
Also, Mitt Romney just finished his press conference. He understands the basics: this is a 500 billion dollar tax hike* on the American people, it will not stand, and so if elected President Mitt Romney will KILL IT WITH FIRE on day one. And that’s pretty much how it has to go. If you want Obama’s health tax gone, well, you won’t get that scenario from the Democratic party. They’re just too invested in Obamacare to stand up to the President.
[UPDATE: Here’s the video of Romney’s presser. Text after the fold.]
They went deep into the weeds to find that straw, too: an obscure rule that almost certainly won’t be invoked at the convention and that can be fixed in an afternoon if anybody at the RNC decides that it’s worth fixing. More fundamentally, the entire scheme revolves around the willingness of a certain Texas Representative to blow up the convention, even if it means that said Representative’s son’s Senate career gets blighted by association in the process.
(pause)
That will not happen. At this point, it suits nobody’s purposes in the GOP to have a contentious primary. That includes the people who were on the outside, last time: this time they’ve got a much better chance to get a seat at the table. To put it another way: what HuffPo is doing here is projecting its own desperate need to disrupt the Republican nomination process onto the rest of us. Which is funny, but not really valid.
Via Hot Air Headlines.
Moe Lane
PS: Best part of the article? “A Romney campaign adviser did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and neither did an RNC spokesman.”
…Good. Sarcastic, mocking laughter might have been personally satisfying, but it probably wouldn’t have been seen as being professional.
Hey, when do you think that the Democrats are going to stop writing, starring in, and producing the raw footage for our attack ads? It’s starting to feel like we should be reporting it as an in-kind contribution.
Partial transcript of DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse, courtesy of Jim Geraghty:
“Broadly speaking, Republicans and Democrats don’t want to see, especially at a time where the economy needs all the fuel it can get, don’t want to see us raising taxes on the middle class. So for example, some of the Bush tax cuts did some good things for the middle class, and certainly don’t want to see, this time, tax increases on the middle class.”
You may remember Brad Woodhouse from the time that he and the DNC passively-aggressively [probably be for the best if I remove that phrase*; also, link fixed] the guy who wanted to try to shoot Eric Cantor. I must say, the specter of DOOM on the horizon seems to have made him and the DNC a bit more… cautious… since those far-off days…
Moe Lane
*Mind you, no direct cause-and-effect link between the two. So stipulated.
You know how people would joke that it was going to be incredibly easy for the RNC to do campaign ads this election season, because they’d write themselves? That in fact the GOP would just have to show Obama and the Democrats being… Obama and the Democrats? That we might not even have to do more than cut and paste?
Yeah. As God is my witness, we were JOKING about that last part. We didn’t think that our opponents were going to be that dumb.
Continue reading The RNC …cuts and pastes OfA’s Anna Wintour ad.
The New York Times reported this morning that the combined raised total for Romney and the RNC was $40.1 million in April, with Romney having $61.4 million in the bank: in comparison, Obama/the DNC raised $43.6 million. Barack Obama’s own cash on hand for April – it was $104.1 million at the end of March – and we probably won’t be told it until the Sunday deadline, or possibly a little later than that. Though, to be fair, Romney and the RNC haven’t submitted their latest fundraising reports to the FEC, either.
Also: while I give points to the NYT for mentioning that this was a significant jump from Romney’s March haul of $12.6 million, they might have kept comparing apples-to-apples and included the RNC’s March fundraising total ($13.7 million). Or noted that the Democrats’ $43.6 million number for April represents a drop from March’s $53 million. Then again, I suppose that there’s a narrative in place. Continue reading Romney/RNC almost catches up with Obama/DNC in April.
Unfortunately, I don’t live in the bubble of privilege that you’ve enjoyed – and apparently don’t really appreciate – for the last two decades or so.
As I noted yesterday, sometimes I forget… what cheap gas was like. Almost sixty bucks to fill the tank today. Thanks for nothing, you urban academic liberal sneers-at-cars-as-being-bourgeois elitist.
Moe Lane
PS: Isn’t it nice to have the RNC actually hit the things that should be hit, and in a timely fashion? Refreshingly novel, too.
That’s the tagline to this RNC video sampling all those excuses that Obama’s made over the last four years (while telling us that he wasn’t going to make any excuses):
And I gotta say: this is one of their better ones. Not designed for TV, mind you. It’s definitely designed for online viewers, so it can run for a minute-twenty-one and that’s OK. More like this, please. And more thirty-second ones that are suitable for TV. They’re important, too.
Via Jim Geraghty’s The Morning Jolt & Campaign Spot.
