The Guadalajara Reporter

Can a plunge into unimaginable turmoil for the GOP be turned around and the damage repaired in just forty-five days?

A lot of journalists, already set to write a piece on the United States’ two presidential candidates this week, got their boats overturned by life’s habit of swamping such well laid plans. Events — riots and killings in the Middle East, surprising remarks by Mitt Romney — drowned the early patchwork of details journalists begin, almost unconsciously, to mentally bank for such coming stories. And in Mexico, these folk were already fielding rough questions about the tangle muy excéntrico that today passes for a presidential showdown in the U.S.

President Obama’s problems — another dismal jobs report (with more of them coming before November 6), an apparently stalled economy (though housing sales have picked up) — seemed to remain carved in stone.

What most dramatically surprised reporters, columnists and editors (and clearly the political wire-pullers and strategists on both sides), has been Mitt Romney’s now over-worked but still remarkable put-down of the “47 percent” of Americans who pay no federal taxes. Such folks, he said, believe “that government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.” His job ‘is not to worry about those,” he told wealthy conservative donors in May.

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