Romney campaigns throughout the night

By GLEN JOHNSON

Associated Press Writer

Don’t say Mitt Romney won’t go the extra mile for a vote.

The Republican presidential contender was logging more than 5,000 of them as he undertook a 37-hour, coast-to-coast-to-coast dash while trying to better rival John McCain in the 21 Super Tuesday nominating contests.

“…I think it communicates to people in California that the entire nation is watching California and what they’re going to do,” he said in Tennessee after setting off on his journey at 7 a.m. EST Monday. “If I win California, that means you’re going to have a conservative in the White House.”

The former Massachusetts governor, who tries to keep his body clock on East Coast time wherever he travels in the country, planned to sleep on the return flight, aided by a pillow, pink fleece blanket and inflatable mattress his campaign staff brought aboard in Oklahoma.

“I want to sleep on the floor as long as the flight attendants say it’s OK, because they need to go up and down the aisle,” Romney said. “My feet will hang out into the aisle, but I’d rather sleep on the floor.”

…

He said he and his wife, Ann, had talked Sunday night about the prospect of walking into the voting booth and seeing his name listed as a candidate for president.

“It’s something I would have never imagined,”…I mean, it’s an honor, obviously, it’s an enormous honor to even be considered as a candidate for president and to know that there will be hundreds of thousands and hopefully millions who will say, ‘You’re the guy we’d like as our next president.’ It’s a very humbling honor,” he added.

…”I feel excited,” he said as he flew west, “very eager for the day to come and to start counting results. It’s going to be hard to go to sleep tomorrow night, because we won’t hear from California probably until very, very late.”

Go California!  We’re counting on you guys!

Share on Facebook

Share This

Gov. Romney maintains his dignity while Johnson loses his composure.

.

More footage here. At the end there if more discussion not shown in the video above.

.

I won’t write much of this but will refer you to a good write-up done by Jon at Blogs for Mitt. Here’s part of what Jon had to say:

Maybe life on the campaign trail is getting to Glen Johnson. Maybe he’s been relegated to a middle seat in the back of the campaign trail. Whatever the reason may be, his behavior in this situation is disgraceful. You don’t see this coming from Liz Sidoti, Michael Luo, or any of the other MSM reporters assigned to cover Mitt. While each of them may have their own personal bias and issues, at least they keep them to themselves. Last time I checked, the job of a reporter is to report, not to challenge a candidate to a verbal duel. Regardless of that fact, Johnson lost this duel.

Memo to Glen Johnson: Words mean things. Mitt means what he says when he tells you who runs his campaign. It’s his campaign organization – you don’t have better insight into it than he does. It’s called a vacation. Consider one. End Memo.

~Nate Gunderson

BTW - Thanks to Nevadagirl for the heads up on the video.

UPDATE:

Click here for a post from the past about Glen’s Agenda Journalism called:
Associated Press’ Glen Johnson = Hack
Headlines are all the matters - What More Need I Say?
Glen Johnson – Same Garbage, Different Article
Hugh vs. Hack (Glen Johnson)
Rush Limbaugh: “Pure Hit Piece” Referring to AP Article on Polygamy in Romney’s Past
Can you believe this?
So Glen, Both Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt have said that you are a Hack Reporter with an agenda. Is Rush a Sr. Romney strategist?

UPDATE #2:

Share on Facebook

Share This

On June 20th, 2007 Greg Shnider wrote a great article called Glen Johnson - Same Garbage, Different Different Article.

Today, Hugh Hewitt chimes in:

The Romney Campaign Posted by: Hugh Hewitt at 10:25 AM

I usually leave it to Patrick and Dean to assess net-based campaign advances, but note this appeal at MyManMitt to help the site get to its goal of $75 K raised for Mitt Romney’s campaign.

The decentralization of the Romney fundraising plan has been extraordinary and very effective. MittRomney.com is the hub, but the number of spokes extending from it is remarkable, and the volunteer effort it presages for the primaries and the general beyond is very good news for the GOP.

Politico’s Mike Allen will be my guest today, and I’ll get his assessment of the GOP race, but as the troubled Thompson campaign flags, it is clearly a Rudy-Mitt race, and the narrowing of the race in New Hampshire underscores this. The key question: As the other candidates fall away, will their supporters break Romney or Giuliani?

Romney on the stump in CA yesterday: “The Democrats are looking strong right now but they’re overplaying their hand. We’re going to knock them out; don’t worry. We’re going to keep the White House.”

This is exactly what Republicans need to hear, and combining optimism with a sharp call for internal reform is a superb bit of positioning heading into the last quarter of the warm-ups.

(Note that the AP story by Glen Johnson begins with a flat-out deception, stating that Romney “once said donating to his presidential campaign would be a nightmare.” Here’s the original “nightmare” quote, from a Marc Ambinder report for Hotline, in January, 2008. Every serious political reporter in the country knows that Romney has always intended to use his money to supplement his fundraising but recognized that a perot-style self-funding could not win a nomination, and Johnson’s bald misstatement of the record makes him either a very bad reporter or a dishonest one.)Thursday, September 27, 2007 The Romney Campaign

Here is a link to another article on this website were Rush Limbaugh said another one of Glen Johnson’s articles was “a pure hit piece”.

Ever time I read an article form Glen Johnson, I wonder what his problem is. Does he work for the DNC? Does he hate Romney because Romney is in shape? Does he have a problem with Romney’s religion? Does anyone out there know Glen? What is his deal?

Share on Facebook

Share This

I was making my way through my Google News updates when a story ostensibly about the team of advisors and congressional supporters that Governor Romney has assembled caught my eye. However, about two sentences into the article I started to smell a rat. I originally found the article on NewsMax which didn’t include an attribution, so I dug around a bit and found out that it was none other than that lovable, liberal hack Glen Johnson back to his old tricks in an article entitled, “Romney Finds Advisers Both Help and Hurt - With Multiple Advisers and Commissions, Romney’s Message Control Imperiled” For more of the Johnson hall of shame go here and here

In typical fashion, Johnson uses a ridiculous and easily refuted premise as a vehicle to dredge up a few of his favorite attacks on Romney. The “news” this time around is that Greg Mankiw, one of Romney’s ECONOMIC advisors, actually supports the McCain Kennedy IMMIGRATION legislation — and this is some how a major league problem for Mitt. Lame, I know, but Johnson never the bashful sort, actually rambles on for paragraph after paragraph trying to make hay out of his meaningless assertion. Here’s some highlights (to save you the torture of wallowing through his mental gymnastics).

1. Claim that Romney was forced to shun Greg Mankiw, a supposed “political enemy within”

“Romney has had to distance himself from his top economics adviser after Mankiw a Princeton-trained economist now teaching at Harvard voiced his support for an immigration bill Romney strongly opposes.”

First off, Romney does not “strongly oppose” the entire legislation as Glen would have you believe. Any perfunctory research (not exactly Johnson’s forte) would tell you that Romney opposes the Z-Visa provision, but has praised other parts of the bill — but I digress. Of course, there’s also no evidence that Romney actually distanced himself in any way from Mankiw (much less was forced to), but that doesn’t phase Johnson. Quite to the contrary, Glen ups the ante and dubs Mankiw a “political enemy within”.

At this point any junior-high student could reason that maybe sometimes political advisors have their own opinions (shock, horror) and this doesn’t necessarily represent a full-blown crisis for a campaign. Or as Kevin Madden the Romney spokesman puts it:

“Advisers are limited to exactly that advice. Advisers are tasked with helping the process along, but the policy is decided by the boss and the boss in this case is Governor Romney, and what he says goes.”

2. [My personal favorite part of the article] Compare Romney’s advisor to some hate-mongers and whack-job liberals in the employ of two democratic candidates

In a comparisons that could only be devised in the mind of an idiot like Johnson, he claims that Romney’s dissention in the ranks is just like the pickle that John Edwards and Al Gore found themselves in with some unsavory advisors. In Edwards case he first defended two of his bigoted bloggers, then finally fired them when he realized that trashing Catholics probably wasn’t a smooth move for a presidential candidate. In Al Gore’s case the advisor was seriously off the reservation:

“in 2000, Vice President Al Gore, another Democrat, suffered collateral damage after the public learned one of his advisers was feminist author Naomi Wolf, who had written that oral sex and masturbation among teens should be considered as alternatives to premarital intercourse.”

Sounds to me like Edwards and Gore allied themselves with run-of-the-mill embarrassments (AKA heroes in the liberal community), and Johnson is trying to equate these losers somehow to Greg Mankiw (AKA Chairman of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers). Is this an apt comparison? I’ll let you be the judge.

3. If you’re wondering how Glen could possible relate this to a Romney flip-flop, don’t worry, this one-trick pony is a master of manipulation.

Such internal philosophical disagreements are especially perilous to Romney, who is fighting charges he himself has flip-flopped over abortion rights, gay rights and embryonic stem cell research, among other topics.

Bingo! We all knew Glen could do it, and he rarely lets us down.

Share on Facebook

Share This