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I played a part of this interview with Radio Iowa today on the show but I want you to hear the whole thing. Her is an important message considering all that is at stake. Look, many of us have been critical of Romney over the years, and some of us had a different favorite early on. As you know, I’ve become more and more impressed with Romney and admire Mrs Romney a great deal. He’s the nominee and I think between us and his wife, he’ll be an excellent president.
But her message to GOP critics of her husband is important because if there was ever a time the GOP does not have the luxury of engaging in self-destructive behavior, it’s now. There’s a great deal at stake in this election beyond even the quality of our own private lives as Americans. This is an existential struggle, which as you can see from the last week, is a matter of life and death for so many. A weak America means nations will falter and slide into tyranny. It’s up to us, for our sake, and the sake of literally everyone else to not let this madness continue.
Via Iowa Radio: (Scroll to the bottom of this post for the audio).
During her remarks to the crowd this afternoon, Mrs. Romney said it is “really hard for me as a wife” to watch the campaign unfold. Former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan recently wrote that it’s “time for an intervention” in the Romney campaign. William Kristol, a conservative who is the editor of The Weekly Standard magazine, used the words “arrogant and stupid” to describe Romney’s comments about the “47 percent” of Americans who won’t vote for him.
During an interview early this evening with Radio Iowa, Mrs. Romney directly addressed her fellow Republicans who’ve criticized her husband.
“Stop it. This is hard. You want to try it? Get in the ring,” she said. “This is hard and, you know, it’s an important thing that we’re doing right now and it’s an important election and it is time for all Americans to realize how significant this election is and how lucky we are to have someone with Mitt’s qualifications and experience and know-how to be able to have the opportunity to run this country.”
The criticism and very public hand wringing from Republicans comes as national polls show the race between Romney and President Obama is essentially tied.
“It’s nonsense and the chattering class…you hear it and then you just let it go right by,” she told Radio Iowa. “…Honestly, at this point, I’m not surprised by anything.”
Romney said her role is to be supportive rather than to give her husband advice about the campaign.
“We call the rope line now the advice line,” she said, laughing, “…because everyone cares and everyone wants to help and everyone wants to just give their peace — a little piece of advice — so I feel like my best advice is just to bring peace and calm to him and just trust in him and just say, ‘I know you can do it,’ but not to give him any advice because it gets too overwhelming.”
Here’s the audio:
Yes, that’s the bottom line, and I think most of us are on board: We’ve squabbled and we’ve made our voices heard, and now we’ve moved into the phase where it’s all coalesced into a single movement. The idealist in me would always like more, but the pragmatist tells me that it’s a pretty decent deal in real-world terms. As Ben Franklin once said, these are the days when we all hang together, if we don’t want to all hang separately.
Tammy has commented that we are like cats and trying to round us all up is as frustrating as trying to round up cats. The recent piece indicating how smart cats are gives me hope that we will all see the light, remember what we are fighting for and come together when it counts on election day. As Maynard states, we all have our idealist, purist cores, but we are more complex than that. We have goals, and while not all of them will be met in one election, we need to call on our realist, pragmatic sides and “hang together”.
Tammy, you and Mrs. Romney have it exactly right. Through primary season movement conservatives were unconvinced by Romney and we had boomlets for Perry, Cain, Bachmann, et al. During that process the establishment pundits and strategists kept telling us that we should coalesce around Romney because he was electable.
Now we are in the homestretch and the overwhelming majority of movement conservatives, realizing what is at stake, have rallied around Romney. And the GOP establishment that convinced the party to nominate him is now full of whining eeyores.
Attention all you GOP strategists positioning yourselves to work on someone’s campaign in 2016: Do you really think the U.S. Presidency will be worth having in the bankrupt nation that will follow another 4 years of the present administration? For six more weeks think about more than your next book or cable TV contract.