Mark Halperin: “Make no mistake, the President still has a major and vital advantage in the Electoral College. For Mitt Romney to win, he is going to need to triumph in states where he is now behind and even some local Republicans say victory seems a reach. Given recent state public and private polling, it is worth asking: Can Romney get to 270 without winning Ohio or Virginia, two states previously thought of as must-wins, but where Obama seems to have a solid lead.”
Peggy Noonan: “I think there is a broad and growing feeling now, among Republicans, that this thing is slipping out of Romney’s hands.”
Mark McKinnon: “I’ve been asked how Romney turns things around at this point. I’ve been a consistent voice warning against writing off his campaign in September. Because I’ve been there before when people wrote off the Bush campaign in 2000. But, now I honestly don’t know what Romney can do to win support from the voters he needs to gain a majority. I thought the debates would be an opportunity, but he has dug his hole so deeply now, I don’t know if he can pull himself out. Does he get up and say, ‘I was just kidding. I don’t see half of America as victims. I just needed to raise some money, and I got a little carried away talking to the 1 percent.'”
Clint Eastwood: “If somebody is dumb enough to ask me to go to political convention and say something, they’re gonna have to take what they get.”
And here is the entire full length video that Mittens so stupidly requested.
Jonathan Chait: ‘…the video exposes an authentic Romney as a far more sinister character than I had imagined. Here is the sneering plutocrat, fully in thrall to a series of pernicious myths that are at the heart of the mania that has seized his party. He believes that market incomes in the United States are a perfect reflection of merit. Far from seeing his own privileged upbringing as the private-school educated son of an auto executive-turned-governor as an obvious refutation of that belief, Romney cites his own life, preposterously, as a confirmation of it. (“I have inherited nothing. Everything I earned I earned the old fashioned way.”) …The revelations in this video come to me as a genuine shock. I have never hated Romney. I presumed his ideological makeover since he set out to run for president was largely phony, even if he was now committed to carry through with it, and to whatever extent he’d come to believe his own lines, he was oblivious or naïve about the damage he would inflict upon the poor, sick, and vulnerable. It seems unavoidable now to conclude that Romney’s embrace of Paul Ryanism is born of actual contempt for the looters and moochers, a class war on behalf of his own class.’
The conservative Weekly Standard: “Plenty of conservatives are pushing back against the worldview espoused by Mitt Romney in his “arrogant and stupid’ remarks at a private fundraiser earlier this year.
The conservative case against Romney’s analysis is multi-pronged. His description of the 47 percent who don’t pay income taxes as “dependents” flies in the face of the conservative view that Americans should be paying fewer, not more, taxes. And historically, most Americans have not paid income taxes. Moreover, most of those who don’t pay income taxes still contribute to the federal government in the form of payroll taxes and other federal taxes and fees. The political argument, that those who are “dependents” won’t be voting for Romney anyway, is demonstrably wrong, and the content and tone of Romney’s remarks don’t strike many conservatives (and others) as particularly presidential.”
Indeed.