Like Goodyear tires, GEICO insurance and DIRECTV before them, supporters for Mitt Romney took to the skies to get their message out in Florida late Sunday, ahead of Monday night’s debate at Lynn University in Boca Raton. Sounds like a good idea, right? It could have been, but Mother Nature had other plans.
High winds forced the craft to make a less-than-controlled quick landing (okay, it crashed) in the town of Davie, between Fort Lauderdale and Miami. The blimp (okay again, it was really a blimp-like thermal airship, but it’s just so much easier to call it a blimp) featured a photo of Mitt Romney with the slogan, “America Needs Romney.” The good news is that no one was injured.
A spokesperson for the Team Romney told the National Journal they were not responsible for the blimp.
Police in Davie, Florida, told NBC Miami that the craft was only five minutes from its destination when the pilot experienced some high winds which forced the crash landing. Witnesses described what they saw:
“We saw the blimp hovering over the house and it was floating backwards it looked like it was actually coming down,” neighbor Teri Balter. “I thought boy, Mitt Romney really wants us to vote for him.”
“We were throwing baseballs outside the front yard, it was so low to the ground, it was just weird,” Alex Balter said…
Witness Rosemary Dondiego, an Obama supporter, was relieved no one was injured and even cracked a joke.
“Yeah, I brought it down with a rock… no,” she said.
Police say the pilot was able to put the craft down in a field and avoid colliding with the nearby houses.
While the Romney campaign was not involved in this incident, the Republican candidate and his campaign have had previous problems with aircraft. You might remember that last month, a plane carrying Ann Romney filled with smoke forcing an emergency landing in Colorado. Later, when talking it about that incident, Mitt Romney said, “When you have a fire in an aircraft, there’s no place to go, exactly, there’s no — and you can’t find any oxygen from outside the aircraft to get in the aircraft, because the windows don’t open. I don’t know why they don’t do that. It’s a real problem.” That physics fail caused Rachel Maddow’s head to nearly asplode. The candidate’s plane also broke down earlier this summer leaving him and his senior staff on a tarmac in Richmond, Va. And then there’s this amazing incident on August 29 that I had forgotten about: A member of the U.S. Secret Service detail assigned to Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney inadvertently left a firearm unattended in the bathroom of the candidate’s chartered flight Wednesday from Tampa to Indianapolis. A reporter using the restroom later discovered the pistol next to the bathroom sink and alerted a flight attendant, who summoned a Secret Service agent to retrieve the weapon. At this point, maybe it’s best for the Romney campaign and its supporters to work closer to terra firma. Maybe Paul Ryan could even get behind the wheel of the wienermobile again.
Nick Ramsey
Nick Ramsey is a senior producer with MSNBC’s “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Recommended
