Topic: Pawlenty endorses Romney

[Libertas]

 

 

[LadyVirginia]

Pawlenty and Romney gives hope to the squishy middle that they won't have to take a stand.

 

[ToddF]

Uh, Staff.  Add this one plz?

 

This one's not good?

Not bad, except you don't get the look on Mitten's face, as Pawlenty kisses away.

 

Please pay my debts, oh please please please....

[charlesoakwood]

Whores.  Just about the whole lot of 'em.

What we have learned is that Tim Pawlenty is a rather shameless whore,             
          
“If Tim Pawlenty wants our help, that’s something we’d help him with, just as we help all our friends.”
– Andrew Saul, Romney campaign spokeswoman

See? Everybody knows what this is about. We can further stipulate as something else “everybody knows” that Pawlenty would have sold his endorsement to any Republican candidate who had agreed to pick up his tab. What we have learned is that Tim Pawlenty is a rather shameless whore, and if I had an intern, I’d assign them do Lexis-Nexis searches for articles from six or eight months ago in which reputable commentators discussed Pawlenty as a viable conservative alternative to Romney.

[Pandora]

Yep, that's me; on the cutting edge.   

Like the unpaid staffers working for Muskie in ’72, Pawlenty’s top staff reportedly agreed to work without pay when his campaign ran low on cash in the weeks leading up to last month’s Ames straw poll. But professional Republican campaign operatives are not altruistic volunteers. To “work without pay” is actually to defer payment, so that your agreed-upon salary, a matter of contractual obligation, is billed to the campaign as a debt. Ditto the contractors, vendors and consultants.

Pawlenty’s rumored “six-figure” campaign debt, then, is owed in large measure to his former top campaign operatives as back pay. And by agreeing to pick up Pawlenty’s tab — c’mon, everybody knows that’s the deal here — Romney is thereby agreeing to pay the salaries of guys who, until a month ago, were contractually obligated to do all in their power to defeat Romney.

This is the kind of stuff that makes people cynical about politics, but if you’re not cynical about politics, it’s only because you don’t actually know anything about politics. Professional campaign operatives are all hired guns. I’m sure they have their ideals — don’t we all? — but idealism doesn’t pay the rent and, when push comes to shove, they work for whoever agrees to hire them. If some of Pawlenty’s former staffers eventually turn up on the staff of Mitt Romney, this is no more a judgment on the character of the ex-Pawlenty people than whatever damned fool notion made them think Tim Pawlenty ever had a ghost’s chance of winning the GOP nomination.

Very informative, doncha think?

[LadyVirginia]

I was a paid staff member for Chuck Grassley's first senate campaign.  At one point I think I was the only one working in the campaign headquarters office that could actually vote for him!