Live-Slogging the Romney Victory Speech

Ann Romney is taking the stage with the Romney spawn. “Thank you Florida,” she says. “This is a very wonderful reception…you know this experience of Mitt running for president has been an extraordinary experience.” I guess she means this time Mitt ran for president, and not the last time. You can’t have two identically extraordinary experiences, right? She suggests that Mitt can get a little silly on the campaign bus. He’s human, guys! Now she’s thanking a long list of folks, urging the audience to applaud only at the end. The audience, against Ann Romney’s pleas, applaud after each name. “You’re not listening,” she chides them. She sounds angry. Then, when she gets to the end of the list, she tells them to applaud.

And here’s Mitt. Gray suit, ugly tie. He looks pretty fucking smug. He praises his opponents, saying these “three gentlemen are serious and able competitors, and I want to thank them.” “Our opponents have been watching…and they like to believe a competitive campaign will leave us divided and weak.” Romney disagrees, saying “it will prepare us.” When they get together in Florida in seven months for the Republican convention, Romney promises the Republicans will be “a united party.” And now he’s launching into his regular old stump speech, saying “we’re here to collect” on Obama’s suggestion that if he didn’t improve the economy, he’d be a one-term president. Romney said he’s met some Hispanic businessmen in real life. “Leadership is about taking responsibility, not making excuses.” He quotes Tom Paine, telling Obama to “Get out of our way.” Romney says he lived “outside Washington,” and so “I know how government can kill jobs, and, yes, I know how it can help from time to time.”

Romney is citing his work on the Olympics again, and his record as governor of Massachusetts. Remarkably (not really), he doesn’t mention the crown jewel of his term as governor, health care reform. “Without raising taxes, I will finally get America to a balanced budget,” he says, to roars of approval from the packed room. “President Obama’s vision of a free economy is to send money to his friends,” he says, adding he wants to return money to the American people. Then he hits “Obamacare’s” bureaucracy, and says President Obama sits with his buddies “in the faculty lounge”—big laugh there from the audience—denigrating different parts of America. Romney says he’ll stand for religious freedom, bigger military—”so powerful no one would ever think of challenging it,” his standard line—and he’ll quit with Obama’s “policies of appeasement.”

Whereas Obama wants to fundamentally transform America, Romney says he’ll return hope to America. “Our blueprint is the Constitution of the United States.” “Hope is a new job and a paycheck and not a word on a bumper sticker,” Romney says, and he adds that he’s against handing out “goodies” and helping people “from cradle to grave.” And he again hits back at how Obama wants to make America into “the worst of what Europe has become.” That’s a pretty solid applause line for the fluent-in-French Mitt, all around the country. And he ends not with his “shining city on a hill” bit or his “speak-singing the words to ‘America the Beautiful’ bit,” but with his campaign slogan: “Believe in America.” As I said in my feature this week, Romney’s only got one gear: Full-on Tom-Cruise-style enthusiastic. This speech was the same as his other speeches, in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina. You could not tell, if you heard each of them without the state identifiers, whether he won or lost the state he’s speaking in. It’s pretty clear from this speech that Romney hasn’t changed his methodology or his delivery—basically, he won Florida because he fought dirty and he tossed a whole lot of money around. This is not a man who learns from his mistakes.