To finish out the second quarter strong, Mitt Romney is hosting a barbecue at Fenway Park for anyone committed to raising money for him the following day.
You read that right: Mitt is renting all of Fenway Park and hosting a barbecue on the field the afternoon of Sunday, June 24. Then, on Monday, June 25, he is holding another “arena fundraiser” in the same style as his January kick-off event that raised over $6.5 million for him.
Anyone who commits to raising at least $5,000 on Monday is welcome to attend the barbecue on Sunday afternoon, and the first 100 volunteers who sign up will get their hotel rooms for free, courtesy of Mitt Romney. Clearly, this guy isn’t afraid to spend money to make money.
According to the campaign, they hope to raise at least $2.5 million on Monday.
June 14th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
You know, the organization that must go into these things is a little mind-numbing. It’s pretty sweet to be rooting for the smart guy in the race.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
That’s why I’m a Paul guy
June 14th, 2007 at 8:10 pm
^ (re the “smart guy in the race”)
June 14th, 2007 at 8:20 pm
heh
June 14th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
I’d love to have Rudy and Romney take the same IQ test.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
And I’m pretty sure we’d find out who the real smart guy in the race is.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Sweet! Spending the money, but spending it very smartly!
June 14th, 2007 at 8:35 pm
You get to hang with Jason all day! What fun!
June 14th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Sounds like a creative idea, but Fenway and the Garden? I realize Romney was the governor there, but why force Republican contributors to travel all the way into the PRM from out of state?
(In case you were wondering…that’s the People’s Republic of Massachusetts)
Seriously, though, what caught my attention in Ambinder’s piece was him saying about Romney’s 2nd Quarter fundraising figures:
“it’s not clear whether he’ll raise more than he did last quarter, when he took in $20M in contributions from individuals.”
Just as stocks don’t necessarily move upward upon a positive earnings report, but must beat the street estimate to climb higher, I wonder what expectations are for Romney within the media, and whether he could possibly be a victim of his own first quarter success. The disappointment in reporting less than last quarter would be tempered, however, by the fact that he’s almost certain to come in first or, at worst, a close second behind Giuliani in the 2nd Quarter among the GOP candidates.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Aron, if the media once again count millions in loans from Romney to himself as funds raised, he’ll have no problem “winning” the Q2 fundraising.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:46 pm
David B,
Get real. The figure most often quoted is 20 million or 21 million. That doesn’t include the loan. Either way he got 33% more than Rudy did with a lower % of his donors maxing out.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
And Rudy still ended up with more cash on hand.
June 14th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
And no, the bigger number was all over the place, without qualification.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
DavidB, how long until you just get tired of arguing Q1 fundraising totals? Romney won. That’s it. There’s hopefully one or two more quarters for Rudy to compete in before he drops out, so best foot forward!
June 14th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
I didn’t say Romney did not win in fundraising. I said it was not as big a win as was reported, and I said Rudy won in cash on hand.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:21 pm
Rudy also ended up with the kind of organization and campaign staff that he paid for, or should I say didn’t pay for.
You definitely get what you pay for, and Romney has some of the best advisors and staff at every level of the campaign in every important state. He also has the best grassroots organization of anyone on the GOP side.
If Rudy had spent some of his money on senior staff with national experience he might have known that his best chance to win the nomination was in Iowa. I’m not saying that he can’t stil win it, but the “Big state Strategy” is the only option he has left, not his first choice.
A more experienced staff might have also figured getting a coherent position on abortion would be important. Rudy would still be at 35% if he took the pro-choice, anti-Roe position that so many wish he would have done. He needed to run away from issues like tax-payer funded abortions instead of endorsing tax-payer funded abortions. His lack of preparation to answer tough questions is going to come back to haunt him.
At least he has that extra money though. Too bad whatever amount he saved by skimping on staff and strategy cost him 10% in the polls. It will cost 10 times what he saved to get his poll numbers back up.
Even though the negative ads have started flying in Romney’s direction, Rudy is by far the most vulnerable and mostly because of how he handled abortion over the past 4 months. Whoever is left standing between Romney and Thompson will surely contrast Rudy’s position with their own and many of those 60%+ who don’t already know he is pro-choice will be turned off by his recent statements on the issue.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Dskinner
Interesting that a Romney supporter like you wants Rudy to become a flip-flopper
on abortion and Roe like your boy Mitt. One of the many reasons I support Rudy is
because of his unwillingness to vary from his beliefs. This kind on honesty will
pay off for Rudy in the long run.
June 14th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
David B,
You want Romney and Rudy to compare IQ’s? Really? Not that IQ indicates much of anything, but I’m game. I have to say though, I think that’s a pretty strange wish from a Rudyite. Romney’s powerful intellect is about the only thing almost everyone agrees on. Rudy’s certainly smart, but…
June 14th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Matt, clearly you haven’t read any Rudy bios.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
It’s irrelevant if I’ve read Rudy bios or not. In terms of sheer credentials, Romney eclipses him. It’s not terribly close either. Romney was valedictorian at BYU (3.97 GPA), he was a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business (top 5%, enormously prestigious), and cum laude at Harvard Law. Giuliani went to Manhattan College, then graduated cum laude at NYU Law. Impressive certainly, but a notch below Romney’s. Also, according to wikipedia, and Village Voice article, Rudy scored a 569 verbal, and a 504 math on his SAT’s. Nothing there shouts staggering intellect. And those were the days when SAT’s actually correlated fairly strongly with IQ. That result correlated with an IQ of about 113.
It’s certainly possible that Giuliani has a staggering intellect, but I don’t see much evidence to support the proposition that he’s particularly likely to come out as the “smart guy” in a comparison of IQ’s.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Matt,
Not that I’m terribly interested in an IQ peeing contest (it’s somewhat self-evident)…but where did you find Rudy’s SAT scores? Is there a source for other politicians as well?
June 14th, 2007 at 10:23 pm
I think we should have a Political Olympics with multiple meaningless events.
IQ test can come first. (My money is on the guy who was #1 in his undergrad class and near the top of both his classes in a Harvard joint MBA/JD program. Which guy is that again?)
The next event probably should be arm wrestling. I know of no better test of manhood than armwrestling. This should be a critical test for each President, especially since everyone but Tom Tancredo could beat Hillary. (FDT would win easily. Did you see him on Leno, he looked like he weighed 280.)
Then a test of remaining credibile while dodging questions. (McCain might win this because he really sounds sincere when he rips other candidates each time he dodges the amnesty bill, however FDT is working really hard at this event by constantly saying “I don’t remember that”, no matter how many times the same issue comes up.)
We probably should add an event of who keeps repeating the most tired lines that never worked in the first place (McCain’s “my friends”, Rudy’s “personally pro-life” and FDT’s “I don’t remember that” are all very strong competitors, but Jim Gilmore probably would win with the “true conservative” line combined with “Rudy McRomney”, mostly because it is coming from a pro-choice candidate who hasn’t caught the irony). Thankfully McCain has retired his joke about the sailors who are offended by the line “spending like drunken sailors”. It’s actually too bad he didn’t stick with it a little while longer because in the debate he sounded like he almost figured out how to tell it without messing the whole thing up.
If you have any other great events for the Political Olympics go ahead and post them. Better yet, let’s come up with ideas for the Democrat’s Political Olympics.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:34 pm
Here: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0028,barrett,16371,1.html
Here’s the excerpt “Rudy’s average at Bishop Loughlin Memorial High School was 84.8, ranking him 130th out of 378 students in his class. His SAT scores were 569 in verbal and 504 in math, meaning he had a mediocre high school record. (34) His Regents average was 79. (Chapter 3, 50)”.
Again, nothing there that impresses me. I agree that IQ pissing contests are pointless. But, David brought it up, and I felt it necessary to respond. I didn’t think anyone seriously Romney’s intelligence.
June 14th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
Matt,
–Rudy’s uncle involved in a Coney Island shoot-out with a mob competitor?
–Giuliani memo to Reagan claims Cubans can’t be released into the community because some of them are homosexuals?
–Illegal campaign contributions from Charlie Hughes, with associated back scratching?
–Judi Giuliani an anti-semite?
–and much much more?
I take it that book is not as friendly to Rudy! as the books written by Rudy’s former staffer?
June 14th, 2007 at 11:01 pm
Yeah, I’ve looked through that book at Borders and it’s definite hit job, but they can’t fabricate facts like test scores and class rank. That’s a matter of semi-public record.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I must say regarding Romney…
It’s pretty sad that he doesn’t know what a non sequitor is.
Him using logical language and not knowing what it means is like this:
I go to Japan, not knowing japanese…but I find a group of American tourists and say, “Ching chong tso!” They think i’m speaking Japanese, so they think I’m a pretty cool guy…but then an American comes along who knows Japanese, and says, “Learn Japanese. You’re making a fool of yourself.”
For Romney to use “non sequitor” and “null set” without knowing what he’s talking about makes people like me, who have studied formal logic in the textbooks, say, “Learn logic.”
He should have just said, “I’m not going to answer a hypothetical question,” not tried to make himself sound smarter by using big words.
The sad part of this is…the majority of Americans are the American tourists who don’t know Japanese. They think it’s pretty nifty that that Romney guy is using big words they don’t understand, but I’m sitting back, embarrassed for him, wishing he would learn Japanese and stop pretending.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:22 pm
I’m very surprised Rudy’s SAT scores are that low, having read about the battles he’s fought and the way he’s fought them. Lower than Bush’s? I’m also surprised my scores (old system) were higher than them all.
Perhaps the SAT does not adequately address problem-solving outside of math.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:23 pm
Nusrat,
I don’t think it’s fair to say that Romney used either non sequitur or null set incorrectly, rather he simply used them non-traditionally. A non-sequitur is a generic logical fallacy. Asking someone whether or not they’d change a previous decision, if they had had certain information, when the lack of that information was precisely the point that was in dispute, is a non-sequitur of sorts. It’s certainly a logical absurdity. Asking the question isn’t a non-sequitur, but answering is guaranteed to result in one.
As for null set, wikipedia states that a null set is simply, in it’s most basic formulation, a “set that’s negligible in some sense”. To be sure, it’s not immediately what the set in question is in Romney’s formulation, but his insistence that it’s an irrelevant, meaningless question, certainly fits with the spirit of a null set.
June 14th, 2007 at 11:57 pm
Not so much against Mitt himself, but after listening to half the crap his supporters spew (and their blind arrogance) is enough for me to steer back over to McCain for second choice if Rudy suddenly died tomorrow.
June 15th, 2007 at 12:49 am
Kris, you and KT are two peas in a pod.
June 15th, 2007 at 12:54 am
No, like Rudy I would not use or justify a test score to dictate my intelligence.
June 15th, 2007 at 1:24 am
Non-sequiteur, null set. Pretty creative answer and ingenius. Lol, people are talking about those terms
instead of talking about Iraq. The more a candidate talks about reasons of going to war in Iraq,
the more it hurts a Republican in the General election. On the other hand, the more a candidate can talk about the
reason to fight the War on Terror, the better his chances are for election.
June 15th, 2007 at 1:24 am
“Non sequitur” is Latin for “it does not follow.” I don’t think Romney was using it in the Philosophy of Logic 320 sense, where it has a technical definition.
Response to Kris: IQ scores don’t dictate your intelligence – but they are supposed to reflect important parts of our everyday concept of ‘intelligence’. Statistically speaking, they are reliable predictors of a large number of important socio-economic outcomes. The performance of someone in the position of President is affected by the same sorts of things IQ tests are supposed to reflect, but obviously those things are only one component of the position. In other words, you can have a very high IQ President who does a terrible job.
June 15th, 2007 at 8:40 am
I got a good laugh out of all of these IQ pissing contest posts. David B and Nusrat – a guy who is on his third marriage and has alienated the affections of his children is someone who has a history of making poor choices – clearly not too intelligent.
June 15th, 2007 at 9:14 am
KevinP, I’m not defending Rudy, either. I think both Rudy and Romney have clouded judgments/cognitions.
June 20th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
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