Washblog

I'd not yet spent any time looking over his website nor made it through an entire Romney stump-speech on CSPAN, so his speech had a few surprises for me.  First off, after establishing his CEO creds with a rare "I knew your boss Steve Ballmer before he came to work for Bill Gates" story, he launched into a short PowerPoint presentation!  Some of my favorites were as follows:

Democrats are economic surrender monkeys!

Protectionism hurts working Americans!

And probably the most ominous slide:

Who saved Christmas (the 2002 Winter Olympics)?  Who fed the needy, sheltered the poor, clothed the naked, and tended the sick as Governor of Massachusetts?
Why Mitt Romney of course!

He's the world's foremost expert on healthcare the world!  As it turns out, according to his extensive research on the subject, half of the uninsured are wealthy American workers making at least fifty thousand dollars a year and that when asked why they don't buy insurance, they respond that it's because they've wisely noted that they don't have to because they get it for free at any emergency room in the state!  Wow.  Massachusetts ERs apparently don't charge ordinary folks with backrupting bills as happens in the other 49.  Now that he's solved that problem for Massachusetts, will he do the same for all Americans as President?  Nope.  That would amount to "socialized medicine" it seems, and bureaucrats and regulations would gum everything up because government is the problem not the solution.

He's frighteningly good at parroting the Reagan anti-government themes and he even did a fair job of selling globalization and free trade to a room full of software engineers whose jobs are moving to Chindia at an alarming rate.  

Romney is your one-stop shop for all that ails America:  He has all the solutions for unwed mothers, terrorists, taxes, Islamic extremists, homeless vets, "Global Jihadists", poorly educated kids, middle class families, American workers, immigrants, Captains of Industry, lawyers, soldiers, and scientists.  Interesting fact:  Most of those solutions flowed from one of two approaches:
1)Tort reform and the removal of "burdensome government regulations and red tape"
 or
2)Some kind of a personal savings account "attached to the individual" that gets charged to a national credit card and transferred to the coffers of one of our fine Corporations and or a privatization scheme that is funded and distributed the same way

Really innovative stuff...

Optimism and Leadership?  Romney's your man.  

Finally, he set us straight on all of Edwards' "two Americas" crap - You see, as it turns out there's only one America, and anyone who says any different is a Traitor.  It's much simpler his way, right?  He took some direct questions from the audience, and as his luck would have it it was mostly friendly softball stuff, and then he wrapped up with the time honored "I appreciate your time, and your money"