Mitt Romney’s First CLC Speech

I discovered that Romney will actually deliver two speeches here at the Nugget in Reno today. This first event appears to be sponsored by the Romney campaign, as the room is covered in Romney posters. The media has arrived in force, although they are complaining about being stuck in the back while seats remain open in the rest of the room. I’ve detached from the booth and set myself up fairly close to the action. I’ll live-blog this speech in case we get squeezed for time on his other appearance.
Keep checking back on this post …
10:37 – Looks like we’re getting underway. This is sponsored by the Republican Women’s Association of Nevada. which is holding their own conference here this week.
10:40 – Women manage a large part of his life, he says to laughter, and not just his wife. He had more women in senior policy positions than any governor in the nation. He tells a good joke about the intelligence of women, versus men.
10:43 – Hillary has a million ideas for America but we don’t have the money to pay for them all, so now we have a million reasons not to vote for her. Romney says this would be funny if it wasn’t such a critical moment in history.
10:45 – China’s progress out of poverty is a “wonderful thing,” but a big challenge to us to remain competitive. Also, “We spend too much money …. When Republicans act like Democrats, America loses.” Big applause.
10:46 – We use too much foreign oil, costing us $1 billion per day. That’s a major part of our trade imbalance.
10:47 – A funny sequence ended in a slighly embarrassing moment when Romney didn’t realize that the hotel is in Sparks, not Reno, which I didn’t realize either.
10:48 – “Republicans and conservatives believe that a strong America is the best ally for peace the world has ever known.” He argues that the GOP is the party of national strength, and not just in the military. He says that we have to maintain a strong economy, which requires strong families.
10:50 – Romney is doing a great job of firing up the crowd on a low-taxes platform. He committed to “killing the death tax”, and he wants to eliminate taxes on savings accounts altogether in order to encourage savings. He told a joke about John Edwards’ tax plan to allow people to save $250 a year without taxes, which Romney said wouldn’t pay for a house, a college education, or even a John Edwards haircut.
10:53 – End of the speech, but Nevada’s governor just showed up for the Q&A. First question regards the line-item veto, quite the softball. Romney commits to getting it back, and he wants to use it to stop the pork-barrel spending. “There were two people dancing in the street when the line-item veto got overturned, and they were Rudy Giuliani and Robert Byrd.” Effective.
10:57 – Will Romney endorse the flat tax alternate plan just endorsed by the Republican Study Group? He says he’ll look at that and the Fair Tax. He’s concerned about the details in the flat tax. He says that the country has finally turned the corner and reached a consensus on tax simplification.
11:00 – The next question is about health care and the number of uninsured in the US. Romney says that the Democrats press the issue to get government to run it. Romney says that “we don’t want the people who ran the Katrina cleanup to run our health care.” He wants to use a system of federal grants to get the private insurers involved at the state level, not with a federal bureaucracy.
11:04 – A long answer on immigration, and Romney says that “sanctuary cities” have to be stopped. The other magnet, illegal employment, has to be stopped as well. He proposes an alien ID card that sounds much like the green cards that have not done much to put a brake on illegal employment.
11:06 – Is the nuclear stockpile increasingly hazardous in an age of terror? Would he support a reduction in our nuclear deterrent, and put more effort into securing “loose nukes”? Romney gives a strong “yes” to the latter. He says it would not be wise to dismantle nukes, especially in light of Iranian intentions to build their own nuclear stockpile. The need for the deterrent is as great now as during the Cold War.
My battery started to run low, so I had to duck out of the last couple of questions. All in all, I think this was a very effective appearance. I may skip the live blog of his second appearance but take notes instead on what differences there were between the two.

7 thoughts on “Mitt Romney’s First CLC Speech”

  1. He says it would not be wise to dismantle nukes, especially in light of Iranian intentions to build their own nuclear stockpile.
    This is one of those answers you could only get away with in a forum so totally friendly. I mean, come on now… let’s say Iran actually did build a nuke. After some point in time, they might build another, doubling their number to … TWO! That could cut our advantage down to less than 6,000 to 1.
    I don’t want all of our nukes dismantled, but we can certainly continue to phase out older, out of date equipment while not replacing it at the same rate. It has a lot of benefits, unless you happen to be somebody who wants to nuke Iran tomorrow.

  2. “we don’t want the people who ran the Katrina cleanup to run our health care.”
    Good point and since I know the Democrats will say, “things will be different when we’re in charge.”
    No they won’t. Besides a few largely figurehead changes at the top, the bureaucracies charged with delivering federal services remain 99.9% the same, when an administration changes.
    Whether the Democrats or Republicans are in charge, it’s the same civil service employees, the same contractors and the same policies and procedures.
    You can’t turn an aircraft carrier on a dime and anyone who thinks that one party or another is going to significantly change a bureaucracy in anything under a decade, is delusional.
    The federal bureaucracy has enough on their hands. They don’t need to be handed responsibility for any additional risky schemes.

  3. Captain, I don’t know how you got mistaken for a Republican woman to get into the first speech. 😉
    In all seriousness…The Second Speech was much like the first. I’d never seen Mitt in person in before. I was no more than 25 feet away from him. He’s a powerful speaker and he got several rounds of applause from me and the rest of the audience loved him. He says all the right things and makes a lot of sense, but the issue of trust still is a big one. How do we know he means what he says given his waffling? As much as I wanted to believe him, I just couldn’t.

  4. HEY HEY !
    thanks for the fine effort Captain.
    You had to put on the reporter boots for that effort.
    Looking forward to your opinion.
    I liked what I have read…

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