A Mass Revolt Against Mitt Romney in Massachusetts

Back at his town-hall rally at St. Anselm in Manchester, Romney is now addressing the claims that he’s been taking Obama out of context with the “You didn’t build that” attacks. “So by the way,” Romney says, “go on YouTube and look at the context, all right, the context is worse than the quote. Because he says if you’re successful you think it’s because you’re smart, but there are a lot of smart people. And if you’re successful you may think it’s because you work hard, but there are a lot of people who work hard. And I wondered, where’s he going with this? Is there something wrong with being smart and working hard?” Obama certainly left himself exposed with his clumsy choice of words, but Romney is again skirting the president’s actual point, somehow managing to take him further out of context in his effort to explain how he’s not taking him out of context.

Continuing on the theme, Romney says, “The other day I thought about a kid who works hard to get the honor roll. And she works real hard. I know that to get the honor roll she had to go on a school bus to get to school. But when she makes the honor roll, I credit the kid, not the bus driver.” Less than a minute after that, Romney lists education as one of his top priorities. “I’m going to make sure that our schools are second to none. We need our kids to have the skills to succeed,” he says. Presumably, he’s going to use honor-roll pixie dust to make that happen, since he declined to acknowledge the publicly funded aspects of a child’s education besides the school-bus driver: the teachers and the schools.

It’s another in a long line of Mitt Romney contortions. For you fine people in the rest of the country, it’s a newer phenomenon. But the majority of voters in our state grew weary of all the shifting, flipping, and word-mincing a long time ago. That is why this rally for the former governor of Massachusetts is happening here in New Hampshire, safely across the border.