The Wednesday Willies

-Headline in The Greenville News:

HALEY REACHES OUT

Governor looks to expand party's appeal, diversity

-Rosalind Helderman and Jon Cohen, The Washington Post:

“The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

Exit polls from 2008 showed that 90 percent of GOP voters were white, a homogeneity that has been consistent for more than 30 years, even as the percentage of the electorate that is white has fallen.

Nonwhite voters favored Obama over Romney by better than three to one in a Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll from early August; 74 percent of Latino voters and 90 percent of African Americans backed Obama.

And despite a speaker lineup in Tampa that includes Artur Davis, a black former Democratic congressman; former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice; and Utah congressional candidate Mia Love, who would be the party’s first black congresswoman if she won in November, just 2 percent of convention delegates are black.

That’s according to an analysis by David Bositis of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. Bositis also said that only two members of the 165-member RNC are black and that none of the leaders of the committees responsible for drafting the GOP platform and adopting the convention rules are black.

“This Republican Party base is white, aging and dying off,” he said.

- TelePrompTers on the right:

On Saturday a near-final draft was finished. When Mr. Ryan returned home to Janesville on Sunday, it was fed into the teleprompters at the Holiday Inn for the first rehearsal.

Too stupid to remember his words? That's the usual conservative meme about that shadowy thing on a stick- and the Democrats who use it.

 -Everything is scripted out to the nth degree but you can still hear the silent dog whistles:

A storybook marriage?  Nope, not at all.

What Mitt Romney and I have is a real marriage.

- 2012 GOP Platform, "A Sacred Contract: Defense of Marriage:" 

We reaffirm our support for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman. We applaud the citizens of the majority of States which have enshrined in their constitutions the traditional concept of marriage, and we support the campaigns underway in several other States to do so...we believe that marriage, the union of one man and one woman, must be upheld as the national standard.

- Interview with Governor Haley in The New York Times, August 29:

Q: Does Mitt Romney need to become more likable or  improve his appeal to voters?

A: We don't elect people because they look good in pictures or hold a baby well. We elect people because they have proven results. He has proven results. It's not about liking him.

- Congressman Joe "You Lie!" Wilson has given Romney a hard look:

As for the convention providing an opportunity for Republicans to humanize Mr. Romney, it seemed to be working on Mr. Wilson, who picked up an important biographical detail from the ubiquitous convention literature.

“I didn’t know he had five sons,” Mr. Wilson noted.

John Sununu, the irascible former governor of New Hampshire, whom Romney resurrected from two decades of well-earned obscurity after he flamed out as Bush 41's chief of staff, is known as the campaign's "Crazy Uncle.  In the HBO movie to come, he will be played by a hologram of the late actor S.Z. Sakall.

This one was known as "Cuddles"

This one they also call "Sunshine"