Policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency. A president must also unite us, inspire us, and defend our vital institutions. https://t.co/jmIw8XbV4k— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) January 2, 2019
PARK CITY, Utah — Mitt Romney warned that a Donald Trump presidency could normalize racism, misogyny and bigotry in the national conscience. Businesswoman Meg Whitman compared the presumptive Republican presidential nominee to Adolf Hitler. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) was asked, uncomfortably, how he could explain his endorsement of Trump to a young child.More.
Then came Trump’s boosters, awkwardly imploring about 300 business executives and GOP establishment donors and strategists gathered here for Romney’s annual ideas festival to unite for the fall campaign. In a stroke of defiance, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus declared that Trump and the GOP would win in November “with or without you,” according to attendees.
So went the three-day Romney-hosted E2 summit that concluded here Saturday in this luxurious mountaintop resort. The confab put on stark display the Republican Party’s moral and philosophical divisions over its new standard-bearer and underscored the difficulty that Trump and allies such as Priebus will have to consolidate forces at the start of a general election in which Democrat Hillary Clinton is favored.
Anthony Scaramucci, a New York financier who was one of Romney’s top funders in 2012, came to Park City seeking to galvanize his old friends to help him raise money for Trump. He likened the atmosphere here to the hit HBO series “Game of Thrones.”
“I feel like Jon Snow, trying to get the Wildlings to team up with the kings of the castles,” Scaramucci said.
Recalling what he told Romney loyalists, Scaramucci said: “Your father just got slayed by your uncle, whom you don’t really like, and your uncle is now in charge. You’ve got the White Walkers descending from the north and they’re coming to hunt you and all the living. What do you do? Do you fight with your uncle or band together and fight the White Walkers?”
Romney made clear he would rather fight his uncle, figuratively speaking. The 2012 GOP presidential nominee was emotional here Saturday as he delivered an impassioned case against Trump. He said the business mogul’s campaign rhetoric — the latest example being his accusations of bias by a federal judge because of his Mexican American heritage — is so destructive that it is fraying at the nation’s moral fabric and could lead to “trickle-down racism.”
“I love what this country is built upon, and its values — and seeing this is breaking my heart,” Romney told summit attendees, according to the Associated Press.
Trump punched back at Romney at his Saturday rally in Tampa, calling him “poor, sad, Mitt Romney” and a “stone-cold loser.”
Scaramucci and other Romney associates supportive of Trump, including Ron Kaufman, a longtime RNC member from Massachusetts, have pleaded with Romney to tone down his opposition in the interest of party unity.
In 2012, the national news media that couldn’t be bothered to look up the college records or classmates of a first-term Senate backbencher running for President suddenly found the high-school life of teenage Mitt Romney utterly fascinating. The media painted him as a rich-snob bully, a meme that continued even after the source admitted he was passing along third-hand hearsay, and after the family of the high-school prank victim ripped news outlets for exploiting the story about the now-deceased young man, and called the narrative “factually inaccurate.” Romney ended up in the ridiculous position of being a man in his sixties apologizing for pranks in his teens, but the aftereffects lingered … not coincidentally, during the summer when Team Obama conducted a massive character assassination campaign against the Republican nominee.Well, Republicans aren't just running against the Democrat nominee. They've got to topple the entire MSM media complex as well.
If Mitt Romney is the answer, what is the question? We can think of a few worthy possibilities, though one that doesn’t come immediately to mind is who would be the best Republican presidential nominee in 2016.That's pretty hard hitting, and undeniably frank.
Mr. Romney told donors last week he is mulling a third run for the White House, confirming cheering whispers from his coterie of advisers. The question the former Massachusetts Governor will have to answer is why he would be a better candidate than he was in 2012.
The answer is not obvious. The logic offered by his admirers is that voters have a case of remorse about rejecting Mr. Romney in 2012, he can raise money and knows how to run a campaign, and even Ronald Reagan didn’t win until his third try.
The Gipper analogy is a stretch. Reagan’s first effort was belated in 1968, he nearly upset President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination in 1976, and when he did finally win the nomination in 1980 he also won the general election. Mr. Romney lost the nomination decisively to John McCain in 2008, and he defeated a historically weak field in 2012 thanks mainly to his ability to raise more money and then pound his competitors with negative ads.
Mr. Romney is a man of admirable personal character, but his political profile is, well, protean. He made the cardinal mistake of pandering to conservatives rather than offering a vision that would attract them. He claimed to be “severely conservative” and embraced “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants, a political killer. But he refused to break from his RomneyCare record in Massachusetts even though it undermined his criticism of ObamaCare. A third campaign would resurrect all of that political baggage—and videotape.
The businessman also failed on his own self-professed terms as a superior manager. His convention was the worst since George H.W. Bush ’s in 1992, focusing more on his biography than a message. This left him open to President Obama ’s barrage against his record at Bain Capital, which Mr. Romney failed to defend because that would have meant playing on Democratic turf, as his strategists liked to put it. The unanswered charges suppressed GOP turnout in key states like Ohio.
Mr. Romney’s campaign team was notable for its mediocrities, led by a strategist whose theory of the race was that voters had already rejected Mr. Obama so the challenger merely needed to seem like a safe alternative. He thus never laid out an economic narrative to counter Mr. Obama’s claim that he had saved the country from a GOP Depression and needed more time for his solutions to work.
And don’t forget the management calamity of Mr. Romney’s voter turnout operation, code-named Orca. Mr. Romney likes to say he reveres “data,” but Mr. Obama’s campaign was years ahead of Mr. Romney’s in using Big Data and social media to boost turnout. The Romney campaign was so clueless on voter mobilization that well into Election Night the candidate still thought he would win. He lost a winnable race 51%-47%, including every closely contested state save North Carolina...
...since his 2012 defeat, Mr Romney has been proved right about a variety of issues. When he called Russia a "geopolitical foe" during a 2012 presidential debate, Mr Obama gibed: "The 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back, because the Cold War has now been over for twenty years."
Since that time, of course, Russia has annexed Crimea and massed troops on Ukraine's border. The shooting down of a Malaysian passenger plane in the east of the country is widely believed to have been carried out by Russian separatists. Advantage Mr Romney.
Within seconds of taunting Mitt over Russia, during that same debate, Mr Obama crowed: "Just a few weeks ago, you said you think we should have more troops in Iraq right now."
As I write these words, Islamic State militants are slaughtering Iraqi minorities having taken over Iraq's largest Christian city. This crisis might have been averted had Mr Obama decided to leave a small reserve force in Iraq. Another round for Mr Romney.
He was prescient about some other details, too, including Mali, where he was criticised for mentioning the rise of Islamist extremists in the northern part of the country.
More importantly, his more proactive foreign policy world-view seems to have been redeemed as the crumbling world we witness today stands as evidence of Mr Obama's failed foreign policy strategy, which has been dubbed "leading from behind".
But it wasn't just foreign policy. On the domestic front, Mr Romney warned about ObamaCare, saying that some of the "people who counted on the insurance plan they had in the past" would "lose it". In 2013, Politifact named the "if you like your plan, you can keep it" line their "lie of the year".
Perhaps this explains why a CNN poll released a couple weeks ago showed Mr Romney leading Mr Obama 53 to 44 in a hypothetical rematch of the 2012 election, though according to that same poll, he would lose to Hillary Clinton...
Geneva: Russia signalled concern on Wednesday at Estonia's treatment of its large ethnic Russian minority, comparing language policy in the Baltic state with what it said was a call in Ukraine to prevent the use of Russian.Yes, and Russia needs Lebensraum, no doubt.
Russia has defended its annexation of Ukraine's Crimea peninsula by arguing it has the right to protect Russian-speakers outside its borders, so the reference to linguistic tensions in another former Soviet republic comes at a highly sensitive moment.
Russia fully supported the protection of the rights of linguistic minorities, a Moscow diplomat told the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, according to a summary of the session issued by the UN's information department.
"Language should not be used to segregate and isolate groups," the diplomat was reported as saying. Russia was "concerned by steps taken in this regard in Estonia as well as in Ukraine", the Moscow envoy was said to have added.
Will everyone please stop talking about a new Cold War?Cranky flacks? Like the "realist" apologists for Putin?
However badly things work out between Russia and the United States and the West, a new Cold War isn't in the cards because Russia today isn't the Soviet Union. Sure, we are in a diplomatic and geostrategic conflict with Russia, which was the heart of the old Soviet Union. Also, Russia wants much of the real estate that belonged to the Soviet Union before it collapsed. And Vladimir Putin is a former KGB colonel who now waxes nostalgic for the good old days. That's about it.
That's hardly nothing, but the Cold War was far more than a conflict with Russia. Everyone should agree on that. Communism, anti-communism and anti-anti-communism divided Americans for decades, particularly among academic and media elites. Right and left may still argue over the merits of those divisions, but no informed person disputes that the topic of communism — the real version and the imagined ideal — incited riots of intellectual and political disagreement in the West for a half century.
Meanwhile, Putin's ideology holds little such allure to Americans or the populations of the European Union. With the exception of a few cranky apologists and flacks, it's hard to find anyone in the West openly defending Putin on the merits. And even those who come close are generally doing so in a backhanded way to criticize U.S. policies or the Obama administration. The dream of a "greater Russia" or a "Eurasian Union" simply does not put fire in the minds of men — non-Russian men, at least — the way the dream of global socialist revolution once did. And that's a good thing.
LONDON—U.S. officials negotiating with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov over the future of Ukraine were surprised last week after the experienced diplomat excused himself to phone President Vladimir Putin in Moscow.That's rich.
His making such a call wasn't unusual: Mr. Lavrov often sought instructions from the Kremlin leader. The Americans were stunned, however, when Mr. Lavrov reported that Mr. Putin had refused to take his call.
Coming during the final U.S. attempts to preserve the modern borders of Europe, the episode with Mr. Lavrov here last week underscored the Obama administration's inability to penetrate the Kremlin and its struggles to comprehend Mr. Putin's calculations five years after President Barack Obama decided to reset Washington's ties with Moscow.
Russia's rapid move this week to absorb Crimea came despite breakneck U.S. diplomatic efforts, showing the limits of that approach with Moscow and marking a renewed chill with an expansionist-minded partner still seen as vital to core American interests around the world.
The Obama administration is now left crafting a more confrontational policy toward Mr. Putin, but it remains unclear how far it will go. The inner workings of the Obama administration's diplomatic push, including Mr. Lavrov's phone call, were described by several senior U.S., European and Russian officials who were familiar with the recent negotiations.
Since the crisis over Ukraine erupted last month, the White House gave Secretary of State John Kerry the task of aggressively engaging Mr. Lavrov. But the administration soon concluded that the Soviet-trained bureaucrat wasn't empowered to cut deals on the Kremlin's plans to annex Ukraine's Crimean region.
The White House, sensing its isolation from Mr. Putin, desperately set about to find alternate channels to influence Russia's strongman and to step up Mr. Obama's outreach to him, according to senior U.S. officials.
The moves included establishing back channels with Moscow-friendly foreign leaders. Mr. Obama phoned German Chancellor Angela Merkel multiple times, as well as British Prime Minister David Cameron and French President François Hollande, and reached out to Nursultan Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan's ruler, the White House said. Mr. Kerry has met with Israel's Russian-born foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, at least once, U.S. and Israeli officials said. The efforts didn't seem to have much impact. (Mr. Nazarbayev recognized the Kremlin's annexation of Crimea on Tuesday.)
Mr. Obama in four phone calls with Mr. Putin over the past month totaling 4½ hours also failed to make headway with a leader he had cultivated as a crucial ally in trying to roll back the spread of nuclear weapons and international terrorism.
This dynamic created a growing unease in Washington that Mr. Putin was simply using diplomacy—and Mr. Lavrov—as political cover for moving his forces into Crimea and possibly greater Ukraine. Mr. Lavrov repeatedly assured Mr. Kerry that Russia planned to respect Ukraine's borders.
Kremlin officials have said Russia's diplomatic efforts were genuine. Mr. Lavrov couldn't be reached for comment...
MOSCOW — President Vladimir V. Putin reclaimed Crimea as a part of Russia on Tuesday, reversing what he described as a historic injustice inflicted by the Soviet Union 60 years ago and brushing aside international condemnation that could leave Russia isolated for years to come.More.
In an emotional address steeped in years of resentment and bitterness at perceived slights from the West, Mr. Putin made it clear that Russia’s patience for post-Cold War accommodation, much diminished of late, had finally been exhausted. Speaking to the country’s political elite in the Grand Kremlin Palace, he said he did not seek to divide Ukraine any further, but he vowed to protect Russia’s interests there from what he described as Western actions that had left Russia feeling cornered.
“Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people,” Mr. Putin declared in his address, delivered in the chandeliered St. George’s Hall before hundreds of members of Parliament, governors and others. His remarks, which lasted 47 minutes, were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of “Russia, Russia.” Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes.
A theme coursing throughout his remarks was the restoration of Russia after a period of humiliation following the Soviet collapse, which he has famously called “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
He denounced what he called the global domination of one superpower and its allies that emerged. “They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts,” he said. “That’s the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: ‘Well, this doesn’t involve you.’ ”
The speed of Mr. Putin’s annexation of Crimea, redrawing an international border that has been recognized as part of an independent Ukraine for 23 years, has been breathtaking and so far apparently unstoppable.
While his actions, which the United States, Europe and Ukraine do not recognize, provoked renewed denunciations and threats of tougher sanctions and diplomatic isolation, it remained unclear how far the West was willing to go to punish Mr. Putin. The leaders of what had been the Group of 8 nations announced they would meet next week as the Group of 7, excluding Russia from a club Russia once desperately craved to join.
Certainly the sanctions imposed on Russia ahead of Tuesday’s steps did nothing to dissuade Mr. Putin, as he rushed to make a claim to Crimea that he argued conformed to international law and precedent.
Why are there no good choices? From Crimea to North Korea, from Syria to Egypt, and from Iraq to Afghanistan, America apparently has no good options. If possession is nine-tenths of the law, Russia owns Crimea and all we can do is sanction and disinvite—and wring our hands.Keep reading.
Iran is following North Korea's nuclear path, but it seems that we can only entreat Iran to sign the same kind of agreement North Korea once signed, undoubtedly with the same result.
Our tough talk about a red line in Syria prompted Vladimir Putin's sleight of hand, leaving the chemicals and killings much as they were. We say Bashar Assad must go, but aligning with his al Qaeda-backed opposition is an unacceptable option.
And how can it be that Iraq and Afghanistan each refused to sign the status-of-forces agreement with us—with the very nation that shed the blood of thousands of our bravest for them?
Why, across the world, are America's hands so tied?
A large part of the answer is our leader's terrible timing. In virtually every foreign-affairs crisis we have faced these past five years, there was a point when America had good choices and good options. There was a juncture when America had the potential to influence events. But we failed to act at the propitious point; that moment having passed, we were left without acceptable options. In foreign affairs as in life, there is, as Shakespeare had it, "a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries."
During the 2012 campaign, I, like every liberal writer whose job it is to comment on politics every day, wrote many unkind things about Mitt Romney. Much of the time I found him more sad than despicable; politicians who nearly reach the pinnacle of their profession while being manifestly awful at politics are a rare and curious breed. Like Al Gore before him, Romney's discomfort with the requirements of campaigning was so close to the surface that he couldn't help but inspire a kind of pity. That isn't to say that I didn't find plenty of his statements and policy positions contemptible, because I certainly did, and said so without hesitation. But in the end, Romney wasn't as easy to hate as some other politicians might be.In other words, "we f-ked that guy over more ruthlessly than one of R. Kelly underage sexual assault victims."
So a year after he joined that small, melancholy club of presidential losers, it's time that even those of us who thought it would be a terrible thing if he became president can see Romney as a human being. In January, Netflix will be releasing a behind-the-scenes documentary called "Mitt," and the preview is surprisingly endearing...
Chrysler Group LLC majority owner Fiat SpA F.MI -1.32% has struck a deal with Guangzhou Automobile Group 2238.HK -2.18% to restart Jeep production in China, a major step toward expanding the brand in the world's largest auto market.And remember Stephanie Cutter, Team Obama's chief propaganda minister? She attacked Mitt Romney as a liar all year, but she's the one who'd been lying. I know. We knew that already. But the lies just keep coming, don't they? See the Obama for America clip here. And you know, Chrysler and GM were in the tank with the lies as well. Mitt Romney was right. Team Obama claimed a "fact-based" campaign. What they actually achieved was an Orwellian nightmare that leveraged them back into power on deceit and demonization.
The Jeep was first launched in China in 1983, and although production there ended in 2009 when Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, the brand remains well recognized. Today, Jeep sells three models in China—the Grand Cherokee, Wrangler and Compass—all imported.
Fiat said Tuesday it had signed a "framework agreement" to expand its partnership with Guangzhou to build more Fiat models, as well as to add Jeep production to China. Fiat already jointly builds the Fiat Viaggio, a midsize sedan, with the state-owned Guangzhou and imports several other models, including the subcompact 500.
The company didn't offer an exact time frame for Jeep production in China, saying only that any models built there will be for the Chinese market exclusively. At this point, it's unclear what models are being considered.
Chrysler and Fiat Chief Executive Sergio Marchionne has targeted Jeep, along with Italy's Alfa Romeo, as two brands with the potential to grow globally. With new models and localized factory production, Mr. Marchionne aims to expand Jeep's presence in Europe, Russia and China.
"The expansion of the agreement with our GAC partners will allow us to unleash the potential of both our Fiat and Chrysler Group brands in China," said Jeep chief Mike Manley, who is also chief operating officer for Fiat and Chrysler in Asia. He said the next-generation Jeep midsize sport utility vehicle, the Liberty replacement, will also be sold in China.
