The News From Romney

It’s been so quiet in Mitt Romney’s camp lately we haven’t had occasion to give anyone The Willard Mitt Romney Worse Week Than You Award for a couple of weeks. Just when we thought we couldn’t take it anymore, a flurry of Romney news has come. Phew.

It seems Mitt has been busy shuttling checks from his personal account to his campaign account. Campaign finance numbers from the third quarter are pretty astounding for Mr. Romney:

The former governor wrote himself an $8.5 million check in the third quarter and raised an additional $10 million from contributors, his campaign said. That brings to $17.4 million the amount Romney has loaned his campaign since launching his White House bid in January – 28 percent of the $62.4 million he has banked.

We can’t really blame the guy– if we had millions of dollars kicking around in our bank accounts, we’d probably loan ourselves some cash too. But both the dollar amount and the percentage are awfully large.

Yet the news is not all bad for the Coiffed Conservative. James Dobson, the evangelical talk show host and founder of Focus on the Family, said he and the 1.5 million people in his radio audience may take their ball and go to a third-party candidate if the Republicans don’t nominate a conservative candidate. While Dobson has ruled out John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Fred Thompson, he’s still mulling Romney.

Mitt, who knows an opportunity when he sees one, has continued to court the evangelicals that the other candidates have left behind.

Last Friday, Romney met privately in Salt Lake City with approximately 200 members of a powerful group called the Council on National Policy, to which Dobson belongs. Aides said Romney assured the group that his conversion to being an abortion opponent is complete and that he supports a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

Romney’s “conversion” to the anti-abortion side (it sounds so religious, almost evangelical), as well as his anti gay marriage stance has also created forces working against him. The Log Cabin Republicans, an organization for gay Republicans, has released a television spot with clips of Romney defending abortion rights and stating he has “Massachusetts values.”

Heaven forbid!

But the gay Republicans aren’t the only ones with ads. Mitt launched a new radio advertisement today that is kind of morbid:

I believe it’s not fair that you have to pay taxes when you earn your money, when you save your money, and when you die.

That’s why I’ll kill the death tax once and for all and roll back tax rates across the board.

Death to the death tax! Kill!

But not the stem cells. Those, we’ll save.

Good to have you back, Mitt.