Mitt Romney is running for President, for Pete's sake. He had an exhausting convention last week, don't ya know? As Rachel Maddow pointed out on her show tonight, usually after a convention, candidates it the ground running. And then Rachel said this,
Mitt Romney, today, is not on a bus tour, or a train tour or any kind of tour. When you get to be the presidential nominee of your Party, you have what's called a press pool that follows you around at all times. It's basically a small pool of reporters who track your every movement, all day long, 24 hours a day. And then they distribute that information to the rest of the press. Well today, the Mitt Romney press pool was informed at 10:00 a.m. that Mr. Romney was down for the day; that he had no events scheduled. The press was essentially told to stand down. Romney watch is over for the day; nothing to see here. You can leave. You got nothing to cover. That was about 10:00 a.m. But the, an hour and a half later, this almost never happens, the press was called back into action. After being told that he was down for the day, they were informed an hour and a half later that Mr. Romney actually was going to be on the move. So the press pool immediately had to snap into action in order to cover this event: Mr. Romney taking his boat out for a spin on a lake. Instead of a cross-country whistle-stop tour, Mr. Romney spent the day boating and also jet skiing with his family in a lake in New Hampshire. They reopened the press pool for that after closing it for the day earlier.
Mr. Romney had no campaign events yesterday; he had no campaign events today unless something's happening on this boat, and he had no public events scheduled for the rest of the entire week. And, you know, that's their call. They can do whatever they want to do. They can put Clint Eastwood on network primetime coverage instead of the candidate intro video. Do what you want. It's your campaign. But it's not like they've got it in the bag here and they can be this relaxed. Before the Democratic convention starts tomorrow, so while you can still isolate the impact of the Republican convention on voters' opinions about the two candidates, this right now is what the big Republican convention bump looks like in the polls. See this part right here, what that is showing here, is the day before the Republican convention started last week [Romney one point ahead]. And then, here's the period of the convention [see entire image, Romney one point behind] running all the way through today. Put this in the category of World's Least Exciting Graphs; also, the World's Most Imperceptible Bounce. Blue is Obama, red is Romney. Those are the results from Gallup's daily tracking poll.
Gallup also measures reaction to the convention in terms of whether people say what they saw of the convention will make them more likely or less likely to vote for the candidate in question. On that front there is a net two point uptick for Mr. Romney from his convention in terms of people saying they are more likely [40%] or less likely [38%] for him after having seen the convention. That net plus two is the lowest recorded impact for any convention from either Party since 1984. In terms of Mr. Romney's speech specifically, which is supposed to be the high point of any convention. Even a convention that doesn't include Clint Eastwood scolding an empty chair for fifteen minutes, the nominee's speech this year itself got the lowest rating of any nominee's convention speech since they have been polling on nominees convention speeches, which they started doing back in 1996.
The video clip is below the fleur-de-orange. What amazed me about this clip was the fact that Mitt Romney is being so blatantly arrogant that after his tiring week in Tampa, he needed to take time off from campaigning. This made me think about last year when the GOP tried to make a big deal about how many vacation days President Obama had been taking. Somebody had the bright idea to compare the number of days
President Obama had taken compared to President Bush over the same period of time. And somebody else had the idea to create the beer bottle comparison graph below.
Poor Mitt Romney is so tired. Think about it. He's technically been retired since his term as Governor of Massachusetts ended. When was the last time the man had to put in a hard day's work, much less an entire week of work. Plus, technically, a president is never off duty. Is Romney really up the physical challenges the job requires? Doesn't the fact that he's taking time off from his campaign at this critical point demonstrate where his priorities are? Isn't it an indication that he will be taking a lot of vacations, just like GWB did? Just wondering.
Or maybe he just thinks that the massive amount of campaign cash he's accumulated will do the job of buying the election for him, and so he doesn't need to get out in front of the voters and campaign. He just needs to keep having those private meetings with donors.