Talk:Mitt Romney

Romney portal

Is this, Portal:Mitt Romney, a bit silly, given the sparsity of articles on him? I was annoyed that Obama had a portal, and a wikiproject, but there is enough material to justify the attention (barely). Would this be considered a form of politicizing WP, or am i being overly paranoid?Mercurywoodrose (talk) 03:11, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes :-) {grin} but give it time — at least until voting day Tuesday; or Inauguration day in January. — Charles Edwin Shipp (talk) 02:07, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Reassessment may be in order in absence of a Romney inauguration. I think Portal:Mitt Romney looks great and is important due to prominence in the presidential election. What do you think? Charles Edwin Shipp (talk) 00:08, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Seems silly to me, and unlikely to grow any further. His 2012 campaign may have destroyed his political career. He's got enough political baggage for several candidates by now. ~ Robin Lionheart (talk) 09:22, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

Whither "Political positions" subsection

A lot of tense and relevancy problems there now. What to do going forward? One approach would be to keep it as it is but cast it all in the past tense. Another choice would be to weed it down in size (for example, the comparison of his budget plan versus Ryan's are pretty unimportant now, even in a historical sense, as are the statements about whether he would propose abortion legislation). Another choice would be to keep only the very most important items and merge those into the 2012 campaign section proper, and then have a separate top-level "Political positions" section with a tiny summary and a "main" xref to the subarticle. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:20, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

Why should there be any difference in relevancy between today and yesterday? With a change of tenses, everything there should still apply. Going forward, it would be ideal to have a very brief top-level Political Positions section, with a link to the subarticle. Right now isn't the best time to start working on converting to the latter though. Better to wait at least a month or so. The tense modification could start immediately, however. Dezastru (talk) 15:52, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Wasted. On a side note, it will be really interesting to see who continues to take an interest in this page moving forward.Jasonnewyork (talk) 16:47, 7 November 2012 (UTC)

So apparently your interest is that now that the election is over you think that no one will notice if you try to get rid of anything positive for which Romney is known? Arzel (talk) 14:55, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

His positions are still his positions unless he comes out publicly and changes/denies them. I see absolutely no reason to "streamline" any of this page based on simply the personal opinion of "since he lost, we should gut all the work thats been done"... Ckruschke (talk) 18:14, 8 November 2012 (UTC)Ckruschke

Yes his positions are his positions, and I don't think anyone is suggesting we "gut all the work thats been done". WastedTime is the one who has done most of that work, and he's the one suggesting the tweak. It is proposal to revise one section, and I agree with Wasted and Jason that some revision would be appropriate, and Wasted picks a good example. However, Ckruschke is correct that his positions remain his positions unless changed, so I'm not sure putting them in the past tense is quite the right approach. Does the section primarily deal with positions that he took into the 2012 campaign? If so, then they could be put into past tense in a slight rewrite that makes it clear that they were campaigning points (which do pass) as distinct from personal views (which don't, unless otherwise indicated). Hope that makes sense...hamiltonstone (talk) 22:14, 8 November 2012 (UTC)

The problem with the tense is the many of the positions are implicitly conditional upon "if elected president", such as "Romney has proposed measures intended ..." and "Romney pledges to lead an effort ..." and "He plans to formally label China ..." and so forth. Well, he's not going to be president, and moreover, his importance in the American political scene is going to quickly go to zero. He's 65, lost a race that most in his party thought should have been won, has no political office to return to, has no power base or ideological constituency within his party, and has no presence in Washington. He's going to disappear faster than Michael Dukakis, who was perhaps the closest recent similar losing candidate.

The other problem is, what is the purpose of "Political positions" sections and subarticles? If you look at Category:Political positions of American politicians, virtually all of the entries are for politicians campaigning for office during the WP era. They are essentially voter guides, written during campaigns and intended to be read during campaigns. How much biographical significance do they have after the campaigns are over? It's interesting to note that the authors of FA articles about past political figures have almost always not included "Political positions" sections or subarticles in them ... not Richard Nixon or Gerald Ford or Calvin Coolidge or Garret Hobart or Grover Cleveland or a bunch of others. The only historical one that does with a summary section is Theodore Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan has a "See also" entry to one. To me that indicates that simply changing the tenses of this section is not necessarily the best course of action. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:32, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

The difference with those other presidential candidates is that they are so much further removed from us in time. They were candidates before the emergence of Wikipedia and widely-accessible digital information. For candidates campaigning today (or within the past 5-10 years or so), it is a trivial matter to collect via the internet in just a matter of minutes information on the candidates' political positions. Researching candidates from earlier periods is more involved, often necessitating a physical trip to a library to review archival material that is not readily accessible online to the casual researcher and the review of books that also are not necessarily available online. Just as important, if not more so, it's also much too soon for books based on high-quality research to have been published that cover our contemporaries (like the positions taken by Romney or Gingrich or Huckabee), AND their times, in the way that past politicians and their times have been covered. As for the issue of tenses, why could the article not simply say, "Romney proposed measures intended ..." and "Romney pledged to lead an effort ..." and "He planned to formally label China ..."? Dezastru (talk) 03:07, 9 November 2012 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and made the tense changes, along the lines you propose. In separate edits, I've also removed the two things I mentioned at the beginning as things I think no longer need to be here and can be left to the daughter article. Wasted Time R (talk) 02:15, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 10 November 2012

At the bottom of the section for the 2012 presidential campaign, the sentence "In the end, Romney won 206 electoral college votes to Obama's 303, losing all but one of the battleground states." should be corrected with the updated result for Florida (Obama won 332 electoral votes). Booboobane (talk) 21:20, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

 Already done Callanecc (talk • contribs • logs) 22:52, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Purpose of Wikipedia and documentation of Cranbrook pranks

Earlier this year there was a spirited debate about allowing a page on Wikipedia that documented what is referred to in this article as only "pranks". The initial page was called Cranbrook Incident and later moved to Mitt Romney Cranbrook Incident. For obvious political reasons many didn't want any negative information to appear about their favorite candidate on Wikipedia. Therefore, the only compromise reached was just to allow this page to say there were pranks and that he apologized for them. There is a problem if we leave it like this. The fact is Romney has now lost the election and researchers will look for reasons many years to come. One factor they will see is Romney called a bully, and there is no hiding the fact that there are now thousands of web pages that describe the Cranbrook Incident. There is no article here on Wikipedia that allows documentation of this incident. Is it not a key purpose of Wikipedia to report historical truth? Spinsters have done a good job trying to purge any record of this page off Wikipedia. Even the debate has been purged. I have a version of the page in my sandbox still. Who now agrees that a historical truth that harmed a candidates votes for office is worth its own page? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Pbmaise/sandbox Pbmaise (talk) 11:28, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

The compromise that was eventually reached was to put the Cranbrook incident details into a Note, which is tied to the main text that you refer to. It's currently Note #1, see here. And that has a regular footnote to the Washington Post story that revealed the incident, currently footnote #18, see here. Now maybe you would rather it was in the main text than in a Note, but that's the compromise that was reached between editors who wanted that and editors who didn't think it should be in at all. Also note that the debate over it has not been purged, but rather moved to the Talk archives. It's still there, in fact it spans four or five of those archive pages. Do a "Search archives" (see button near the top of this page) for "Cranbrook incident" and you'll see what I mean. Wasted Time R (talk) 12:09, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I still object to the use of the term "prank" in this instance on the article.--Amadscientist (talk) 02:51, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

The text in the Note itself does not call it a prank per se. It lists the Cranbrook-era pranks. Then it says, "In 2012, five former classmates described a 1965 episode ..." Then it gives Romney's response, which was in terms of the other pranks. In any case, the definition of this kind of compromise is that nobody's fully happy with what results, and that is certainly the case here. While you were prominent in the Archives 12, 13, and 15 discussions on this, you weren't part of the 16 and 18 discussions, with the latter having the 'minimalist proposal' that settled on this form. And the consensus in favor of that proposal was pretty strong. Wasted Time R (talk) 13:25, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Standard political position topics:

I see Michael Huckabee's article, and there is a sub-section labeled as controversies. Those controversies were about him saying Obama is from Kenya, and many more criticised statements. They were all put there in a very unbiased, and correct manner. I think we should also put a political controversies section on Barack Obama's page. He has before made very controversial statements. For example, when he said, "You didn't build that." Referring to the small business owners. Mitt Romney's 47% video was very controversial. I am trying to be as moderate as possible. So if we could just in a very unbiased, and polite manner, put a political controversies section on all politician's pages, so we can be fair. Thanks, I would like feedback. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cole levine 24 (talk • contribs) 16:22, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

No, experience has shown that separate "Controversies" sections are a poor practice that leads to junk accumulation, and they are considered a violation of WP:NPOV and multiple other guidelines. In particular, back in 2007 a special effort was undertaken to rid all 2008 presidential candidates' biographical articles of such treatment — see Wikipedia talk:WikiProject United States presidential elections/Archive 1#Status of "controversies" pages for the history of that effort — and the same thing was done for all of the 2012 contenders. The Huckabee subsections are something that crept in after his 2008 campaign and should be undone (that article has terrible structural problems overall - for example, his 11-year governorship only gets two paragraphs, while minor trifles like a staged caller incident get more). In high-quality, GA/FA-level biographies, controversial matters should be discussed in chronology with everything else, where the proper context and weighting and balance and understanding can be maintained. In this article, for example, the 47% remark is included in the 2012 presidential campaign section, where it belongs. Wasted Time R (talk) 17:47, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

Least influential person of 2012

http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/blogsoutofcontext/55360998-64/utah-trib-romney-attends.html.csp Finally Mitt wins something. Surely it's worth a mention? Hcobb (talk) 18:11, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't think so, the list was made in a humorous way, not really noteworthy for here. MavsFan28 (talk) 19:17, 28 November 2012 (UTC)

Mitt won a major party presidential nomination, which the large percentage of presidential wannabees never accomplish. The award for most inept and underperforming candidate in this cycle would definitely have to go to Rick Perry, not Mitt. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:32, 29 November 2012 (UTC)

I also don't see this as being particularly relevant to Mitt's life overall.--174.93.165.157 (talk) 21:47, 30 November 2012 (UTC)

Post-Election

Perhaps a new section needs to be made for his post election life, he is now primarily residing in San Diego's La Jolla (Orlando Sentinel), and has rejoined the Marriott's Board of Directors (USA Today).--RightCowLeftCoast (talk) 21:40, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Section now exists, with the Marriott board rejoining. Too soon to call a primary residence, though, especially since winter is the time of year he probably avoids New Hampshire and Massaschusetts anyway. Wasted Time R (talk) 01:38, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Edit request on 25 December 2012

Add Governor of Massachusetts to list of Positions in infobox 122.106.177.130 (talk) 01:36, 25 December 2012 (UTC)