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Feb. 8, 2013
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Jewish World Review
Nov. 8, 2012/ 23 Mar-Cheshvan, 5773
At Romney headquarters, the defeat of the 1 percent
By
Dana Milbank
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
BOSTON — It was a victory party fit for the 1 percent.
Over in Chicago, the Obama campaign had invited 10,000 to fill the floor of the McCormick Place convention center. But here in Boston, Mitt Romney favored a more genteel soiree for an exclusive crowd. Romney’s election-night event was in a ballroom at the Boston Exhibition and Convention Center that could accommodate a few hundred. Most men wore jacket and tie; women donned dresses and heels. Secret Service agents blocked reporters from mixing with the Romney supporters as they sipped cocktails and nibbled canapes. Outside the ballroom, waiters in black tie tended bar, and Jumbotrons showed the election results on Fox News. Downstairs, Romney’s big donors assembled in private rooms for finer fare; guards admitted only those whose credentials said “National Finance Committee.” “We’re going to have a great celebration here tonight,” Romney adviser Ed Gillespie told the crowd as early results trickled in. But the election results, even filtered through the rose-colored lenses of Fox News, were not promising. Michigan fell to Obama, and then so did Pennsylvania and Minnesota. Obama was holding his own in Florida and Virginia, and things were looking grim for Romney in Ohio. The ballroom was as quiet as a library as the audience listened to the Fox personalities on-screen. “Romney would have to draw to an inside straight” at this point, pronounced Brit Hume, who predicted “an awful lot of recriminations.” Some of those with the “National Finance Committee” badges went to freshen their drinks. Other attendees headed to the coat check. “I have a son who has a test tomorrow,” one woman explained. “It literally hurts my soul,” one man said as he headed toward the exit. Others lamented their wasted labors (“We did so much for him”) and fretted about a second Obama term (“I don’t want him to feel like he has a [expletive] mandate”). Among those who remained in the ballroom’s thinning crowd, one man looked at the screen and saw the Ohio count. “Uh-oh,” he said. Romney had spent nearly two years, and hundreds of millions of dollars, trying to convince Americans that he wasn’t an out-of-touch millionaire unconcerned about the little people — that he was more than a caricature who liked to fire people, who didn’t care about the very poor or the 47 percent who pay no income tax, who has friends who own NASCAR teams. He very nearly achieved it: Polls showed him neck-and-neck with Obama in the campaign’s closing days. But his final day in the race showed why he couldn’t persuade enough working-class Americans that he spoke for them. On the final flight of his campaign Tuesday afternoon, Romney ventured to the back of his plane for a chat with reporters and discovered that — horrors! — the poor wretches were seated in coach accommodations. “I thought you had bigger seats back here,” he told them. Fortunately, this discovery did not distract the Republican nominee from making some salient points before rejoining aides at the front of the plane: his lack of regrets (“I’m very proud”), his delight at the crowds (“When you have 10,000 people cheering you, you get a real boost”), his confidence (“I just finished writing a victory speech”) and how he would reward himself in victory. “Assuming I win, one of the benefits is . . . to get another Weimaraner,” he disclosed when asked about puppy rumors. So, one of his first gestures as president-elect would be to purchase a pricey hunting dog once bred by European royalty? In that sense, Romney’s election-night celebration was a fitting coda to his presidential bid: It abandoned any pretense of being a campaign for the common man. On election night in 2000, George W. Bush hosted an outdoor rally for thousands in Austin. In 2008, Barack Obama addressed a mass of humanity in Chicago’s Grant Park. Then there was Romney’s fete — for which reporters were charged $1,000 a seat. The very location set the candidate and his well-heeled supporters apart from the masses: The gleaming convention center, built with hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, is on a peninsula in the Boston harbor that was turned into an election-night fortress, with helicopters overhead, metal barricades and authorities searching vehicles. Only a few gawkers crossed the bridge from downtown to stand outside. Massachusetts, the state Romney once led as governor, was among the first to be called for Obama. But many other states followed. At 11:14 p.m., the thinning crowd here heard Fox’s Bret Baier project that Obama had won Ohio. “That’s the presidency,” he said. “The president has won reelection,” Hume affirmed. From Obama headquarters in Chicago, Fox’s Ed Henry described “pandemonium.” And in the ballroom in Boston, the Romney supporters stood in silence.
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Previously:
• 11/07/12 Why I voted Republican
• 11/06/12 Romney's new tune
• 11/01/12 The Supreme Court's dog-day afternoon
• 10/31/12 A perfect political storm
• 10/29/12 Behind the Clinton 'bromance,' a stealth campaign
• 10/25/12 A Trumped-up bomb
• 10/24/12 Groupthink Live: How conventional wisdom congeals in 2012
• 10/23/12 The sound of worldviews not colliding
• 10/22/12 The tea party is helping Dems
• 10/18/12 Moderate Mitt wins conservatives' blessings
• 10/16/12 Reid's latest salvos are beneath the dignity of his office
• 10/08/12 Obama pays price for ducking the questions
• 10/05/12 Mitt Romney holds his own -- and then some -- in first debate
• 10/03//12 The Zinger candidacy --- all sugary platitudes, no protein
• 09/25/12 Obama makes room for 'The View'
• 08/17/12 Hateful speech on 'hate' groups: The Family Research Council is no KKK
• 08/16/12 Now Dems are employing harsh tactics
• 08/14/12 Paul Ryan on soapbox at Iowa State Fair
• 08/13/12 Romney's welfare gambit
• 08/07/12 Harry Reid's latest broadside
• 07/26/12 Romney can't have it both ways on defense spending, tax cuts
• 07/19/12 Ron Paul, fed up
• 07/17/12 The rotten results of one-party rule
• 07/11/12 The missing giants of the Senate
• 07/09/12 Representative Gaffe
• 07/02/12 The umpire strikes back
• 06/25/12 Norquist delivers the GOP's marching orders
• 06/19/12 The left, feeling left out
• 06/18/12 Skip the falsehoods, Mr. President, and give us a plan
• 06/15/12 The Wall Street Senate
• 06/13/12 Jeb Bush's heresy
• 06/12/12 Pileup at the White House
• 06/11/12 Obama's fate could be in Europe's hands
• 06/04/12 Welcome to Camp Competitive
• 05/31/12 Digging a racial grave
• 05/30/12 A new conspiracy theory: Is Romney a unicorn?
• 05/29/12 Do Republicans really want to clone one for the Gipper?
• 05/24/12 Obama's protectors are under the microscope
• 05/22/12 Obama's Old World mess: Allies are coming up short at a key moment
• 05/16/12 Where have all the candidates gone?
• 05/15/12 Barack Obama, the first female president
• 05/14/12 Irrationality wins: Voter cure for Congress's failures will likely backfire
• 05/08/12 Obama's marriage mess: His advisers scramble to clean up his 'evolution'
• 05/07/12 Taking out Dick Lugar
• 05/03/12 Gingrich may have ended campaign, but he will remain out of this world
• 05/02/12 Our do-almost-nothing Congress
• 05/01/12 President Obama, campaigner in chief
• 04/25/12 Romney's immigration Etch a Sketch
• 04/23/12 A congressional deal on immigration? Dream on
• 04/19/12 Dems battle back against Republican 'war on women'
• 04/18/12 Debauchery: An American govermental specialty
• 04/17/12 Silent witness
• 04/12/12 Rebuffing Obama's gimmicky 'Buffett Rule'
• 04/11/12 Santorum's Gettysburg surrender
• 04/09/12 The facts vs. Mitt Romney
• 04/06/12 Mitt Romney, talking to the press, keeps the press at a distance
• 04/05/12 From tracking al-Qaeda to tracking the wayward spouse
• 04/04/12 Budget cuts as back-door deregulation
• 03/26/12 My pet Mitt
• 03/22/12 Mitt Romney's latest gaffe may be etched in history
• 03/20/12 Supreme Court conceives of life after death
• 03/15/12 Conservative for Obama: The British PM as campaign prop
• 03/14/12 In Section 60, a silent search for meaning
• 03/13/12 Super Friends, unite
• 03/12/12 It's time to believe: Romney's a winner
• 03/07/12 Settling in to Washington's ways
• 03/06/12 AIPAC beats the drums of war
• 03/05/12 Did Republicans forget the women's vote?
• 02/29/12 Mitt Romney's acceptance speech, in (mostly) his own words
• 02/28/12 Common ground becomes a great divide
• 02/27/12 An expert witness for the GOP gender gap
• 02/21/12 Where Romney shines
• 02/15/12 A Republican death wish?
• 02/14/12Obama's budget games
• 02/13/12 Are GOPers playing right into Obama's hands?
• 02/08/12 Obama pumps the compressor of Joe Hudy's Extreme Marshmallow Cannon
• 02/07/12 Abramoff's atonement
• 02/01/12 Why we in the media just love Newt
• 01/31/12 The end of the road for Newt Gingrich?
• 01/25/12 Gingrich is Obama's best surrogate
• 01/24/12 Tim Pawlenty, Mitt Romney's attack dog
• 01/16/12 Mitt Romney's Al Gore problem
• 01/12/12 Kamikaze Gingrich, on the loose in South Carolina
• 01/11/12 Journalists' campaign trail secrets revealed
• 01/10/12 Mitt Romney's money problem
• 01/09/12 Newtonian exceptionalism
• 01/05/12 Mitt Romney out of control
• 01/04/12 Indecision 2012: In Iowa and the GOP
• 01/03/12 Rick Santorum's curious closing argument
• 12/28/11 A few cracks in my crystal ball
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• 12/20/11 Strange brews and views?
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• 11/08/11 The 2012 campaign gets seedier
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• 11/03/11 The Herman Cain crack-up
• 11/01/11 Cain can --- he will survive
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• 10/26/11 Democrats on the sidelines
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• 04/06/11: Paul Ryan's irresponsible budget
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