Mitt Romney

By Matt Miller I have just the thing if President Obama was serious about asking Mitt Romney to "work together to move this country forward. " Romney was a world-class management consultant with a legendary appetite for "the data. " His private-equity success was due partly to his knack for identifying and purging inefficiencies from bloated, underperforming enterprises. It's time, therefore, to set him loose (analytically speaking) on the mother of all domestic challenges: America's radically inefficient health-care system.

NEW HAVEN, CONN. - Fred Shapiro, associate librarian at Yale Law School, has released his seventh annual list of the most notable quotations of the year. The original "Yale Book of Quotations" was published in 2006, and Shapiro has updated it with an annual list of the top-10 quotes. Shapiro picks quotes that are famous, important or revealing of the spirit of the times, not necessarily ones that are the most eloquent or admirable. Here's the list: 1. "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what . . . who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims . . . These are people who pay no income tax . . . and so my job is not to worry about those people.

ONLY WHEN candidates speak in private do they reveal who they really are and what they really think. Mitt Romney did that in his remarks secretly recorded at a dinner for $50,000-and-up donors to his campaign in Boca Raton, Fla., in May. We should not forget what he said to those donors: "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what . . . who are dependent on the government, who believe they are victims . . ....

I wonder if I'm retroactively retired and just don't know it yet. As Mitt Romney has shown, drawing a paycheck is no barrier to becoming retroactively retired at some point in the future. I'm on the young side to be any kind of retired, but so was Mitt when he made his backdated exit as chief executive of Bain Capital. Don't worry if you're confused. Every aspect of the furious political back-and-forth over Romney's departure from the Boston private-equity firm can make your head spin.

I've always known I was lucky to have health insurance - unlike close to 1 in 6 Americans - but last week again made that clear. After Mitt Romney's recent comments on that topic, I'm thinking I may need treatment for vertigo. Consider the dizzying distance the GOP nominee traveled in three days. On 60 Minutes , he echoed George W. Bush's what-me-worry line that Americans can always go to the emergency room. "If someone has a heart attack, they don't sit in their apartment and die," Romney said.

At the outset of his recent foreign trip, Mitt Romney committed a gaffe. In answer to a question about the Olympics, he expressed skepticism about London's preparations. The response confounded and agitated Romney supporters because it was such an unforced error. The question invited a simple paean to Olympic spirit and British grit, not the critical analysis of a former Olympic organizer.   Soon that initial stumble was transmuted into a metaphor for everything that followed.

IF YOU'RE like me, you're on pins and needles waiting for Mitt Romney to release his tax returns so we can see (a) just how rich he really is and (b) what he's hiding from the American people.   Actually, I'm kidding. I don't give a rat's rump about Mitt's returns, other than to satisfy some voyeuristic curiosity. I mean, what? Rich people use tax laws to stay rich? That's news? The whole thing's a dopey distraction intended to keep folks focused on Mitt's money so that they don't focus on the lack of their own. Searchlight attention on a rich man's wealth means no spotlight on declines of middle-class income and assets.

DERRY, N.H. - Ron McPhail mashed the horn and leaned out the window of his dump truck, yelling at the politician who was walking down the sidewalk Tuesday pursued by a pack of about 50 photographers and reporters. "Way to go, Mitt!" he said. "You've got my vote!" Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, grinned, confident after emerging almost untouched from his first Republican presidential debate Monday night. He celebrated by tearing through two diners, a hardware store, and a feed store, accepting compliments on his performance and continuing to push his economic message that President Obama has failed to put the nation on a prosperous path.

Foreign policy hasn't figured much in the presidential campaign, which is lucky for Mitt Romney. With scant foreign policy experience, Romney has had trouble projecting himself as a statesman. His foreign policy statements have veered from vague to disturbingly hawkish. So this week, he's off to Europe and Israel in hopes of burnishing his image as the future leader of the "free world. " Unfortunately, the world Romney seeks to lead no longer exists. Romney's foreign affairs statements have a Rip Van Winkle quality, as if he had just emerged from a sleep of two decades.

The president is a polarizing figure whose reelection is imperiled by his handling of the nation's No. 1 issue. However, he's blessed with an opponent who is easy to attack — a rich Massachusetts patrician with seemingly flexible convictions and a personality that impedes any visceral connection with voters.   But enough about George W. Bush and John Kerry. You see where I'm going with this. The 2012 contest has taken on the broad contours of 2004, when Bush eked out a narrow win by framing the race not as a referendum on his stewardship of the war in Iraq, but as a choice between the devil people knew and the devil they didn't.

"MITT Romney doesn't get it. " That's what Michael Nutter said at last year's Democratic National Convention. The mayor jabbed hard and fast at the Republican contender on the subject of education. Never mind that Philadelphia's schools have been in perpetual crisis for years. And here we are again, $304 million short. His plan? Try to keep the blame on Harrisburg. If they won't raise vice taxes, don't blame Nutter for the fact that our kids' schools, if they are still open, do not have foreign language or music or art or counselors or nurses or lunch-room aides or secretaries or security or disciplinarians or librarians or books or paper.

When it comes to presidential elections in Pennsylvania, Republicans are like Tantalus, the figure of Greek mythology. The man whose name lives on in the word tantalize was doomed to stand in a pool of water that he could never drink, while grabbing for fruit from a tree he could never reach - for eternity. The Keystone State always looks winnable for Republicans, on paper, but in each of the last six presidential elections, it has slipped away. It's a strategic mirage. In 1988, George H.W. Bush cracked the code, clawing his way to 50 percent of the vote in the Philadelphia media market, home to up to 42 percent of votes cast statewide.

WASHINGTON - The White House on Sunday warned Republicans that a "my way or the highway" approach would spell the GOP's defeat in the budget negotiations and told its Democratic allies that they, too, will have to bend on President Obama's delayed spending plan, set to be released this week. White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said the White House was willing to work with rank-and-file Republicans to come up with an outline that both jump-starts the economy and reduces the nation's red ink. Yet Pfeiffer also told the GOP that stubbornness among their party's leadership would only yield public embarrassment of the sort the GOP faced last year when voters rejected Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney's economic proposals and gave Obama a second term.

As the confetti fell from the ceiling and President Obama took the stage for his 2012 victory speech, there may have been a factor he forgot to thank - social media. And as Republican candidate Mitt Romney learned of his defeat, there may have been a factor that wasn't foremost in his mind - social media. In a world where people yearn for information at lightning speed, where perception via social media sites like Twitter and Facebook can be a candidate's best friend or worst enemy, it has become increasingly crucial for today's politician to master the information technology of the day. Kevin Arceneaux, an associate professor of political science at Temple University, has watched the use of social media grow from 2004, where they played a minor role, to the present day, where they have become "a central tool for campaigns.

THE PRIMARY election season for the 2016 presidential cycle may be three years away but we've already noticed one name missing from the pack of would-be contenders in several polls. Former U.S. Sen. Rick Santorum , who finished second to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in the 2012 Republican primaries, is not getting much pollster attention. That stood out to us because Romney finished second in the 2008 Republican primaries to U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who finished second in 2000 to former Texas Gov. George W. Bush . McCain and Romney went on to win the GOP nomination for president in their next attempts.

Meeting with African American leaders at the governor's mansion last year, Gov. Christie told a story from his student days at the University of Delaware. An African American friend, hoping to give the young Christie a sense of being black on a largely white campus, took the future governor to the historically black Delaware State University. Christie stood out. He got stares. And so, the boy from the white North Jersey suburbs got a small sense of his friend's daily existence. Michael Blunt, the African American mayor of tiny Chesilhurst borough in Camden County, recalls being moved when hearing the story.

BOSTON - Mitt Romney is back, if only briefly. The former Republican presidential candidate is reemerging after nearly four months in seclusion at his Southern California home. Former aides describe his burst of activity this month - a national broadcast interview, a speech at a gathering of conservatives - as a thank-you tour of sorts designed to close out a lengthy political career. His party isn't exactly clamoring for his return. In his first public comments in months, Romney used a Fox News interview to criticize President Obama's leadership.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is being shunned by the Conservative Political Action Committee, or CPAC, the big confab held each year with top Republican contenders, according to a report. The Washington Post reports that a source not authorized to speak on the record for CPAC said Christie has not been invited. However, CPAC has still not announced its full schedule. But Christie irked a lot of conservatives in the fall after giving credit to President Obama in wake of Superstorm Sandy.

Sometimes 90 percent just isn't good enough. Ask Mitch McConnell, the most powerful Republican in the U.S. Senate, who, despite a lifetime approval rating of 90 percent from the American Conservative Union, is out of step with some GOP Kentuckians. A recent Courier-Journal Bluegrass Poll of 609 registered voters found twice as many people promising to vote against McConnell as those committed to supporting him (34 percent of Republicans said they'd support him against all competitors)

WASHINGTON - For many Republicans, this is a good weekend to get away from it all. With hundreds of thousands of Democrats traveling to nation's capital for President Obama's inauguration activities, Republicans and supporters of last fall's GOP presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, are leaving town, or staying put and trying to avoid the crowds. After failing to recapture the White House for a second straight presidential election, many are not exactly in a partying mood. "It's a good time to lay low," said John Feehery, president of Quinn Gillespie Communications and a former congressional aide.