Negligence

There is no doubt that Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan and their campaign staff are working very hard to achieve their goal. The amount of intense dedication it takes to run for President is indescribable… tireless days and nights on the trail, meeting literally tens of thousands of people.

But clearly, some things are NOT working in the Romney campaign, or in the 2012 version of the Republican Party. The discipline and unity of their messaging has been tested during the current campaign cycle, and so far, they’ve failed almost every test. Of course considering how many lies the GOP has had to contrive this year, it shouldn’t be a surprise that staying on message is a challenge.

Romney has had a fair share of gaffes along the way… “I’m not concerned about the very poor”, “Corporations are people, my friend” and of course when he said the perhaps ill-fated phrase “there are a lot of reasons NOT to elect me“. Umm, ok… if you say so.

But of course everyone makes gaffes. We all say things we didn’t quite mean to say, and especially having to be in the public eye 24/7, it’s bound to happen. But the Romney campaign is about more than gaffes. There is a serious issue with negligence of the work that they are doing. Many of the critical decisions that they have made have turned out to be very damaging. Some think that they’ve caused more harm than the Obama campaign ever could.

Take the Republican National Convention in Tampa. This convention was supposed to be all about Mitt Romney. Each speaker selected had a primary objective of showing their party faithful (and the American people) why Mr. Romney should be elected President. Yet, they had a barrage of speakers like Chris Christie and Rick Santorum that barely even mentioned Romney, if at all. Plenty of reasons not to like Barack Obama, but very little positives to say for the ACTUAL party nominee. It should be no surprise that Romney received no convention bounce at all after the RNC, given the negligence shown by his leaders to let such under-whelming surrogates take the lead. And of course… this doesn’t even begin to mention the Clint Eastwood “empty chair” fiasco.

And then of course the recent foriegn policy blunder made by the GOP nominee virtually speaks for itself. Political pundits from both left and right have come out to criticize the Romney campaign’s swift and judgemental response to a situation they were not informed of. The sad part of it is, without that huge misstep, the GOP may have been able to capitalize on the a difficult time for the Obama doctrine by simply remaining silent until the facts were known. But clearly, they blew it.

This continued pattern of negligence has left the top of the GOP ticket very weak… perhaps too weak to be able to withstand another big misstep. Which is why the timing of a very revealing leak from Mother Jones couldn’t be worse if you’re a Romney surrogate or supporter. In the video, Mitt Romney is caught on tape describing all Obama voters as “dependent upon government for food, housing and health care.” He literally depicts all supporters of the President as lower-class voters who are lazy and can’t fend for (or think for) themselves. It’s a shocking comment that is sure to garner the attention of voters through November…

But in this particular case, none of the negligent opinions expressed here can be blamed on campaign staff or fixed by “re-tooling”. These comments all come from Romney himself… so convincing that it’s hard to believe they could ever be a gaffe. Negligence, indeed.