Every single time the Huntsman campaign releases another anti-Romney video, I have the same reaction: “Hey, that’s pretty good!”
I thought that about the “pretzel” video, the flipping-toy-monkey video, the weathervane video, and this week’s “Mittstant Replay” video.
Today, via Taegan Goddard, Huntsman’s team offers another gem, this time connecting Romney’s incessant flip-flopping to his background with the Olympics. It turns out, Romney flips with all the grace of a crashing gymnast.
Notice, again, that the video can, should, and probably will be used by any other campaign — just lop off the last five seconds and it’s good to go.
And on a related note, Huntsman’s new video reminds me that Romney and the Olympics offer more than just a metaphor. We know a fair amount about Romney’s time at Bain Capital, where he broke up companies and laid off American workers, and quite a bit about Romney’s one term as governor, where he had an abysmal record of creating jobs and passed a health care law he doesn’t want to talk about, but what about the 2002 winter games in Utah?
It’s true that the Olympics were in trouble when Romney took over, but as Frank Rich recently explained, “The most significant workers he added to the payroll in Salt Lake City were sixteen lobbyists, at a cost of nearly $4 million, to solicit taxpayers’ subsidies — ‘more federal cash than any previous U.S. Olympics,’ according to The Wall Street Journal. That’s hard to square with Romney’s current stand that jobs will bloom across the land if government stops giving any handouts (even to tornado victims, he said in the GOP debate) and lets the free market work its magic.”
Right. Romney may have been a brutal vulture capitalist and an unpopular one-term governor, but he succeeded with the Olympics by increasing taxpayer spending, much of which went to investments in infrastructure — which Romney and his party now oppose.
In fact, reader Gov’t Mule recently highlighted “the federal subsidies that were directed to Olympics-connected private interests,” including many who can fairly be described now as the “1 percent.”
