The Olympics turns out to be mixed blessing for Mitt Romney’s candidacy. On the one hand, he touts his role in running the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City as if that were a major accomplishment and, for reasons that escape me, the media seem to take it at face value though it is not clear what running the Olympic games has got to do with one’s ability to be a good president.
In addition, people talk of him ‘rescuing’ it, but the fact that he took over $1 billion from the federal government to bail it out seems to be ignored.
His other misfortune is that it was this year of all the years in which wife’s horse qualified for the dressage event. People wearing top hats and seated astride dancing horses is not exactly the kind of image that sits well with anyone other than the one-percenters. However much Romney may try to pin this on his wife and distance himself from it, the timing of the Olympics cannot be helping.
Stephen Colbert tries to help him out of this embarrassing situation.
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(This clip appeared on July 30, 2012. To get suggestions on how to view clips of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report outside the US, please see this earlier post.)
Horses don’t sit well with voters unless they’ve got cowboys on ’em.
Well, he could always try to twist this around to show that his wife does too have a real job.
He was able to get a $77,000 tax write off for his snobby hobby too. I hope it wins a medal, the extra publicity would be a bittersweet victory.
How do you write off your hobby? I need to ask my accountant about that one…
I’m just picturing Mitt Romney trying to include this in one of his horrible, strained attempts at trying to seem like a regular guy.
“So there I was all set to strap the dog to the roof of my luxury automobile and drive to one of my vacation homes so I could put my feet up, open a beer, and watch one of the sporting matches we Regular Joes like so much when my wife says,
‘But Mitt! You promised to go to Virginia and watch my million dollar horse prance to music with me!’ Women! Amirite fellahs? Huh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t divorce ’em cuzz Joseph Smith says so.”
Ha, that’s funny. But Mormons can’t divorce?
Their accountant was able to declare their horse a business. Unfortunately, according to my accountant my beer drinking hobby can’t qualify as such although from my point of view it is more deserving of a taxpayer subsidy than a dancing horse.
Where most religious vows are “till death do us part,” Mormon vows are “together for time and all eternity.” The Osmond’s mother made a point of emphasizing that in several interviews after Marie’s wedding, delivered with a healthy dose of pious superiority. She was oddly silent, however after Marie’s divorce three years later. IIRC, Mormon divorce is a bit like catholic in that you need a church-acceptable reason for getting one, but that is separate and apart from a legal divorce.