Mitt Romney’s Honey Badger John Sununu
FYI for Honey Badgers everywhere.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articl...r-robert-costa
Mitt Romney’s Honey Badger John Sununu is a viral sensation.
By Robert Costa
John Sununu endorses Mitt Romney for president in Concord, N.H., October 24, 2011.
Robert Costa
In presidential politics, the man cable-television pundits may fear most is a 73-year-old retired mechanical engineer from southern New Hampshire.
John H. Sununu, the former Granite State governor, is Mitt Romney’s most pugnacious and ubiquitous surrogate, and he’s shaking up the 2012 campaign.
He is our party’s “honey badger,” says GOP chairman Reince Priebus, playfully referencing an Internet meme about a relentless badger.
Over the past year, Sununu has castigated Fox News’s Juan Williams, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, among many others, for defending the president’s record or touting left-leaning positions.
Most of Sununu’s televised battles have become viral sensations on YouTube. His volatile exchanges with O’Brien alone have garnered over 300,000 views.
During a recent visit to his home near the Atlantic coast, and in a subsequent follow-up interview, Sununu told me that he relishes his unique position in Romney’s hierarchy.
“I should be playing golf and skiing,” Sununu chuckles. “But I’m scared to death for my kids and grandkids.”
By day, Sununu operates as a campaign confidant, advising Romney strategists. By night, usually during primetime, he heads to Saint Anselm College’s small TV studio, puts on an earpiece, and unloads on the Obama campaign.
Sununu’s specialty is the harsh rebuke, and his persona is part Archie Bunker and part schoolteacher. During a recent interview with frequent foil Soledad O’Brien, for example, he mixed Congressional Budget Office citations with a dressing-down of the host.
“All you’re doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there,” Sununu said. “Put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead when you do this.”
Politico took similar comments and edited them together into a montage, “Sununu’s greatest hits.” In the clip, Sununu calls the Obama team “dumb” and “delusional,” and he criticizes the president for his “smarmy philosophy” and “Chicago-style gutter politics.”
“I think you can be tough and aggressive with facts in a way that you cannot be tough and aggressive with emotional retorts,” Sununu explains about his approach. “Most of the people that try to be tough on TV are really just being emotional and not factual.”
For Sununu, who left his job as Bush’s White House chief of staff in late 1991, the cable appearances have been a kind of political comeback. He never really retired from politics, but his Romney work is his first major foray on the national scene in years.
And in many respects, Sununu’s biting commentary echoes his sharp-edged defenses of George H. W. Bush, his close friend of three decades. He is reprising a familiar role as the pit bull with a Ph.D., defending a temperamentally moderate Republican nominee from New England.
“It is remarkable that Sununu mixes so well with the cautious Romney crowd, and Romney himself,” says Larry Sabato, a political-science professor at the University of Virginia. “My guess is Romney appreciates Sununu’s brains, savvy, and fearlessness. He often says what Romney would like to, but won’t dare.”
In May 1990, Time magazine put Sununu on its cover. The headline, which was plastered over a photo of a gruff-looking Sununu, read “Bush’s Bad Cop.” At the time, he was the “power to reckon with,” they wrote.
These days, Sununu is not Romney’s gatekeeper, but he is, as he puts it, the “crazy uncle” for Romney’s hundreds of staffers in Boston, many of whom were children when Sununu was working in the White House.
“I give [the campaign] as much time as I can and they are kind enough to say they want all of it,” Sununu says. “But I also understand the problem of overexposure, and I’m not looking to be seen; I’m looking to be effective.”
William Safire, the late New York Times columnist and Nixon adviser, once wrote that Sununu, a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former dean at Tufts University, is a “quasi-genius, reportedly with an intelligence quotient of 180.”
Sununu brushes that aside, but seems confident in his cable clashes regardless. “Frankly, I don’t really prepare,” he says. “I’m an old man of 73, and I’ve been around a long time. If I don’t know something by now, I probably never will.”
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