Romney offers donors chance to “Dine with the Donald”
Barack Obama’s re-election campaign has raised millions of dollars by auctioning off dinners with the president, first lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, former President Bill Clinton and Hollywood stars – and Democratic supporters – George Clooney and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Now his rival Mitt Romney is getting into the act with some Republican celebrity love – offering the chance to “Dine with the Donald,” that is, Donald Trump — and Mitt — to anyone who donates $3 or more.
“Jets owner Woody Johnson recently previewed a rival event to the George Clooney one that President Obama’s campaign did, and this appears to be it – a raffle for a dinner with Mitt Romney and Donald Trump,” Politico reported on Thursday.
The fund-raising website features a poster modeled on the old “Uncle Sam wants you” military recruiting image, with a picture of the blond real estate mogul and reality television star, in a blue suit and red tie, pointing at the reader. “I want YOU,” it says in large letters, above smaller letters saying “Dine with the Donald… & Mitt.”
Suggestion donation amounts on the site range up to $2500, with a box that can be ticked saying “Make this a recurring donation.”
Participants are eligible to win airport transportation in the Trump vehicle, a stay at the Trump International Hotel & Tower in New York, a Tour of the boardroom from Trump’s reality television show, “Celebrity Apprentice,” and dinner with Trump and Romney.
Maybe it’s better not to get that big endorsement
One staple of the U.S. political scene is the quest for endorsements, and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney seems to be leading in the race for support from the GOP establishment.
He picked up the support of Arizona Senator John McCain, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, who also was a member of the U.S. presidential field until August.
He may not be part of the party “establishment,” but Romney even got the backing of a high-profile party figure — albeit one who declared himself an independent in December — reality television star and real estate mogul Donald Trump, who called the former Massachusetts governor “tough, sharp and smart.”
But does such support really help?
“At best, so far that’s gotten him mixed results,” Republican strategist Keith Appell said, when asked about Romney’s support by party leaders. “Nikki Haley didn’t help in South Carolina. Tim Pawlenty did not help him in Minnesota.”
Prominent supporters can act as useful surrogates. Backers might pay to attend a fundraiser headlined by a well-known supporter, and voters might turn out to hear one speak.
How could a smart guy like Mitt Romney think that the endorsement of a scam artist like Trump could bolster his credibility with anybody. Romney’s ONLY asset is his business acumen, touching Trump is a “tar-baby: that tarnishes that asset.
PS. If phrase “tar-baby” could not conceivably be considered racist, when applied to anyone as “White” as Trump, pc has truly gone too far.
More grief for “The Mitt” with backing from The Donald?
Mitt Romney, Donald Trump said in a surprise endorsement from Las Vegas this afternoon, would make a “tough” and “smart” president who wouldn’t “allow bad things to continue to happen to this country we all love.”
But it wasn’t clear that backing from Trump, a real estate mogul who cultivates an aura of glitz and glamour, would help Romney, the former private equity executive who has a net worth estimated at some $270 million and fights charges by critics that he is out of touch with the concerns of average Americans.
Democrats pounced on the opportunity to draw parallels between Romney and the television personality, claiming in a video that alluded to Trump’s starring role on the reality television program, “The Apprentice,” that Romney nabbed Trump’s endorsement because “they both like firing people.”
Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz echoed the theme, telling MSNBC that the endorsement wasn’t surprising because “they both like firing people and they both made millions doing it.” Likening Trump to a “cartoon character,” the DNC head said his endorsement is “like Bugs Bunny saying which candidate for president he supports. So it’s really kind of a non-news event.”
Newt Gingrich, Romney’s chief Republican rival who had reportedly expected to receive Trump’s backing, issued through his spokesperson a long list of public criticisms Trump had previously leveled at the former Massachusetts governor. Among them was a comment Trump made on CNN in April of last year:
“Mitt Romney is a basically small business guy,” Trump said. “He was a hedge fund guy, a fund guy, he walked away with some money from a very good company that he didn’t create; he worked there. He would buy companies; he’d close companies; he’d get rid of jobs.”
Romney was upset in the South Carolina primary on Jan. 21 after a series of ads portraying him as a heartless corporate raider. He once said – in a remark taken out of contest – that he enjoyed firing people. But he also told a questioner last summer that “corporations are people,” and yesterday took heat for saying he did not care about the very poor.
Why is Trump backing Romney if Mitt still hasn’t shown us his Birth Certificate? http://www.senorromney.com
Gingrich to get Trump recommendation – media reports
The “major announcement” Donald Trump will make Thursday afternoon in Las Vegas is that he is endorsing the presidential bid of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, according to media reports.
The CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, KLAS TV reports sources confirmed what Trump would say. Earlier a Trump spokesman said only that the impending announcement would pertain to the campaign.
Trump’s announcement will come two days before the Republican caucuses in Nevada, the next state in the party’s presidential nominating contest.
The host of the TV show “The Apprentice” and the former Speaker of the House of Representatives met in Manhattan early in December. “I want his endorsement,” Gingrich told a news conference after their hour-long meeting at Trump’s Fifth Avenue office.
Trump flirted with a presidential run as a Republican and was derided for pushing a discredited charge that President Barack Obama, a Democrat seeking re-election, might not have been born in the United States.
He left the Republican party in December, raising the prospect of a potential third-party run for president.
UPDATED
from Political Theater:
Gingrich and Trump plan ‘Apprentice’ show for poor kids
After a meeting with Newt Gingrich in Manhattan this morning, Donald Trump announced plans to start an 'Apprentice'-style program for children from New York City's poorest schools. The idea, apparently hatched during their meeting, is an extension of Gingrich's scheme to hire poor schoolchildren for jobs typically occupied by adults -- including janitor and librarian -- because, as he put it last week, these kids “have no habit of showing up on Monday; they have no habit of staying all day; they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ — unless it’s illegal.”
Speaking to the press this morning, Gingrich said he asked Trump to "take one of the poorer schools in New York and basically offer at least ten apprenticeships to kids from that school to get them into the world of work and get them into an opportunity to earn money and get them into the habit of showing up and realizing that effort gets rewarded and that America is all about the work ethic.”
Trump expounded on the show's premise: "We’re going to be picking ten young, wonderful children and we’re going to make them apprenti," he said. "We’re going to have a little fun with it. It will be something that's going to really prove results. It was Newt’s idea, and I thought it was a great idea.”
Here's the clip, via MSNBC:
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
I find it odd that he picked janitor and librarian as jobs for these kids to do – a librarian is a job that requires higher education. Once again, Newt is lumping poor kids into stereotypical roles… [they]“have no habit of showing up on Monday; they have no habit of staying all day; they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash’ — unless it’s illegal.” I wonder if anyone has asked him how he knows?
“Birther” talk bubbles up again
The “birther” question rises again in a wide-ranging interview with Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry in “Parade.”
The Texas governor dismissed the questioning of whether President Barack Obama is a native-born U.S. citizen as a “distractive issue” — after responding to several questions about the issue.
Asked whether he believes Obama was born in the USA, Perry said he had no reason to think otherwise. But the governor suggested he was not certain about the birth certificate released by Obama.
“Well, I don’t have a definitive answer, because he’s never seen my birth certificate,” Perry said.
But you’ve seen his, the interviewer said. “I don’t know. Have I?” Perry asks.
Perry said the birth certificate came up at his meeting last month with Donald Trump and that the real estate mogul and TV reality show host doesn’t think it’s real.
“I don’t have any idea. It doesn’t matter,” Perry said. “He’s (Obama) the president of the United States. He’s elected. It’s a distractive issue.”
Mr. Trump I’m convinced has a double digit IQ and doesn’t even have the common sense to get a decent toupee. He certainly can afford one.In my opinion his stupid freaking hairdo reflects his intelligence.
He certainly doesn’t have any where near the smarts that his father had.
Yes he’s really lucky his father came first. If Donald was born into a poor or even a middle class family, he most likely would have some simple 9 to 5 job like an office mail clerk, or a Walmart stock boy,etc.
Down to the wire…
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan expects his fellow Republicans to wait until the “last minute” to strike a deal that averts national default by raising the $14.3 trillion limit on the U.S. debt.
Failure to reach a deal could trigger a new global financial crisis, according to analysts and Democrats including President Barack Obama. But on Monday, the day the U.S. debt reached its current statutory limit, Ryan told an Illinois AM radio station that “we’re going to negotiate this thing probably up through July, that’s how these things go.”
“That’s how these things go” could place negotiations at the very doorstep of an Aug. 2 deadline, which is when the Treasury Department believes it will exhaust its bag of tricks for staving off a financial apocalypse.
Ryan’s comments came a day after Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell advised CNN’s viewers to see the approaching default deadline as a source of opportunity.
Meanwhile, inflation worries buttressed by still-way-high gas prices are driving U.S. states to consider making silver and gold coins legal tender. South Carolina is the latest to consider legislation to that effect, joining over two-dozen others in a trend that began this month in Utah.
What happens among the states often has a way of entering the circuitry of presidential politics, as Mitt Romney discovered with the healthcare reforms he championed in Massachusetts.
But at the moment, the presidential campaign debate is focused on Medicare, specifically the mini-GOP civil war between Newt Gingrich and Ryan over the latter’s Medicare reform plan. Newt, currently on the defensive, is being taken to the woodshed today by one of the strongest conservative voices in the United States: The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
No Trump in GOP deck
Was it something they said? Or purely a financial calculation for New York’s celebrity real estate magnate?
In any case, Donald Trump disappointed just about anyone hoping his brashness would offer some entertainment in the race for the Republican nomination in 2012: He declared himself off the campaign trail. Well, technically he was never on it.
In the statement notifying his public of the decision not to run for president, Trump was not shy about his prospects if he had decided to throw his hat into the ring. “I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and ultimately, the general election.”
So it wasn’t a fear of losing that prompted his decision.
And someone with an ego the size of Trump Tower was unlikely to have been scared off by a few sharp jokes from the President of the United States and a Saturday Night Live comedian at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.
So it comes down to business.
“Ultimately, however, business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector,” Trump said.
Now can we see that tax return you promised Donald or was that just another one of your lies.
Reuters/Ipsos poll: Republicans trail Obama
President Barack Obama comes out ahead against the field of potential Republican hopefuls for the 2012 presidential election, with more than a 10-point lead over the closest of the pack — Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll.
When Obama was pitted against each possible Republican candidate, he scored more than 50 percent. His highest rating came against Donald Trump with 57 percent saying they would vote for Obama versus 30 percent for the New York real estate magnate.
All the Republicans were in the 30-percent range, led by former Arkansas governor Huckabee at 39 percent and former Massachusetts governor Romney at 38 percent, compared with 51 percent who said they would vote for Obama.
On the question of whether Obama would win reelection in 2012, the survey was split with 45 percent saying he would win and 42 percent saying he would not.
Obama got no lift on the economic front, with only 34 percent of respondents saying they approve of his handling of the economy, a finding linked directly to a surge in gasoline prices.
The telephone poll of 1,029 adults was conducted May 5-9 and has a 3-point margin of error.
Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Obama in Austin, Texas)
There used to be an old crank that would pop up on every thread and parrot Republican talking points about Obama’s poll numbers, and frequently accuse other people of being paid to post on this forum.
But, interestingly, he quit posting here the day after the last election. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it…
McCain says Trump having fun, Republicans have serious candidates for 2012
Republican Senator John McCain, who lost to Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, made clear that he doesn’t see Donald Trump as a serious candidate for 2012.
“I think Mr. Trump is having a lot of fun and it’s pretty clear he enjoys the limelight. We have very serious candidates. And I think that, if Mr. Trump wants to run, he’s welcome to run,” McCain said on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
That came a day after Trump attended the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, where Obama and comedian Seth Meyers told cutting jokes about the New York real estate magnate.
“Anybody can run. He has a right to run. He is a New York icon, bigger than life in a lot of things, and he can put himself into the mix,” New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Is he worth taking seri0usly?
“That’s up to the voters,” Bloomberg said. “The nice thing about America is you get a chance to go out there and make your case. ”
Boycott everything Chump… I mean Trump
Including Chump Apprentice
@LarryLinn: BRILLIANT.
My question is, is this celebrity dining lottery compulsory for all Romney campaign donors? If so, I’ll be interested to learn what kind of effect this has on campaign donations.
@kafantaris: True, but even self-promoting persons like Trump can be helpful from time to time (when it suits them). There are plenty of people who want to follow in their footsteps…