Word: maddening
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...presidential campaign, Romney has viewed business as a model for government, and in business, as in politics, there are no prizes for second place. In fact, his campaign refuses to characterize the Iowa Caucus results as a loss. "You have to remember, we started at zero," national spokesman Kevin Madden told the press. Romney "returned a good second place result. It's Washington that lost...
...Michigan and whose father was Governor of the state in the '60s - is making a serious bid tailored to independents' tastes. Though Romney pitched himself as a social conservative to Iowa's Republicans, his ads in Michigan and South Carolina focus on "economic pragmatism," says spokesman Kevin Madden. One ad specifically written for Michigan declares that Romney's gubernatorial experience in Massachusetts makes him well suited to help Michigan's ailing economy...
...small talk with everyone, but especially with Mohamed, 22, a U.S. citizen and the Shnewers' only son. "Mohamed was like a baby," his mother Faten Shnewer says. He had dropped out of community college, and he lived at home. He liked to watch the Nickelodeon show Drake & Josh; play Madden, the football video game; and hang out with his five sisters. He worked long hours, often all night, driving a taxi owned by his father and talking by cell phone to his mother and his friends, the Duka brothers...
Much the same way that owners grow to look like their dogs, sometimes spokesmen begin to resemble their candidates. That's certainly true of Kevin Madden, Mitt Romney's national press secretary, though his neat, Romneyesque looks are quickly belied by a thick New York accent. Shifting seamlessly between sound bites and genial (if sometimes vulgar) humor, Madden, 35, has kept the campaign from getting too rattled by Romney's occasional malapropisms and gaffes. The effortlessness with which he laughs off Romney's missteps (when Romney told Fox News that his favorite novel was a sci-fi tome by Scientology...
...approach works because Madden combines it with an unusual level of accessibility that goes against the modern political-campaign theory of strict "message control." Madden's availability and conviviality--he often says that Romney's teetotaling ways mean "there's more left for me"--help shore up the image of a campaign where everything is going just fine, no matter what you hear to the contrary. Says Madden: "The biggest mistake press secretaries make is that they view the press corps as the enemy. I view them as a conduit." That's not the same, it should be noted...