Tales from the Trail

Romney on his work as a Mormon missionary: “We didn’t convert one person”

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday, where co-host Joe Scarborough asked him about his experience as a Mormon missionary in France in the 1960s. “Talk about your rejections as a missionary knocking on door, after door, after door in a hostile environment,” Scarborough asked.

Romney recalled five months he spent in one French city, where he said near-constant brush-offs built his resilience:

“We knocked on doors from morning until quite late in the evening,” he said. “We didn’t convert one person in five months. So, you understand the rejection, you know that’s a pretty high level of rejection and you get used to it. You say, ‘okay, what do I believe, what’s important to me,’ and you don’t measure yourself and your success by how other people react, but instead by how you’re doing and how you feel about the things you care about.”

Watch the clip below (Romney speaks about his experience as a missionary starting at the 2:00 mark):

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Will she? Won’t she? Palin’s still a maybe

Republican celebrity, best-selling author, reality TV star and self-proclaimed mama grizzly Sarah Palin is thinking about adding another title to her ever-growing resume: U.S. president.

Not exactly news, except that the forthcoming issue of the New York Times Magazine says she’s now thinking seriously, right down to the need for new advisers and the means to prove herself on the issues.

Palin, whose titles also include 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee and former Alaska governor, acknowledges that much in an interview with the magazine, according to a preview published by Politico.

“I’m engaged in the internal deliberations candidly, and having that discussion with my family, because my family is the most important consideration here,” Palin says.

Politico says that the magazine says that Palin says there aren’t meaningful differences in policy among the field of GOP hopefuls “but that in fact there’s more to the presidency than that” (those are Palin’s words in quotation marks). Her decision would involve evaluating whether she could bring unique qualities to the table. “Yes, the organization would have to change,” Palin says. “I’d have to bring in more people — more people who are trustworthy.” 

The magazine is published with The New York Times’ Sunday editions.

The U.S. political debate has shifted like quicksilver to the 2012 presidential race since the Nov. 2 midterms, with Republican victories in the House and Senate boosting the hopes of Palin and a dozen other prospective GOP White House wannabes.

Dean, Scarborough claim health insurance stocks hit 52-YEAR high. Really?

Tabassum Zakaria

Dec 20, 2009 15:21 EST

Numbers can be tricky. And when trying to make political points in Washington, they probably should be checked twice (like Santa’s list of naughty and nice).

So when Howard Dean, an influential liberal Democrat, and Joe Scarborough, a conservative Republican commentator, both used the SAME figure to make the SAME point that the Senate healthcare bill would mainly help insurance companies, it caught our attention.

First came Dean on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” saying:  “In this last week of unseemly scrambling for votes, we have committed to go down a path in this country where private insurance will be the way that we achieve universal health care.”

He went on:  “It is not a coincidence … that insurance company stocks, health insurance company stocks, hit a 52-year high on Friday.  So they must know something that the rest of us don’t.”

Yes that was a 52-YEAR high in that comment.

Then Joe Scarborough decided to repeat it, again on “Meet The Press.”

“And as Howard Dean said, and this is a devastating fact, insurance companies’ stocks reached a 52-year high on Friday after this so-called reform bill got its 60th vote,” Scarborough said. “So David Axelrod, who I, you know, love and respect, but David Axelrod kept saying, ‘We took on the insurance companies. This is real reform. They’re against it.’ Really? I don’t think so.”