The first night of the Republican National Convention was heavy with “we built that” references and small business owners who feel overtaxed by the government. But one featured small business owner, Phil Archuletta of P&M Signs, went off-message when he took the stage to rail against the government…for not giving him enough contracts:

ARCHULETTA: For the last 40 years, my company has built the road signs on the Forest Service road system. In fact, in 1984, I was fortunate to receive the national award from President Reagan for being the most successful minority business in the United States. In 2004, President Bush made it possible for our company to manufacture signs for all federal agencies. When President Obama came on board and pushed the stimulus, I believed my business was going to explode with work. Unfortunately, it never happened. … Today, we are barely hanging on with the orders from the state of New Mexico – thanks to Governor Susana Martinez – and the few orders still coming through the Forest Service from our very loyal customers.

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In expressing his frustration, Archuletta is exposing the fundamental lie of the Romney campaign’s “we built that” theme. Government small business loans and contracts have sustained almost every small business Romney has featured in his campaign. Archuletta’s business, like the others, has been sustained by the comparatively reliable supply of government work. Far from disparaging hardworking small business owners as Romney wants voters to believe, President Obama’s original comments celebrated the “American system” that helps bolster individual drive like Archuletta’s, concluding, “When we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.”

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has fired two Montgomery County board of election members who voted for expanded early voting hours on weekends in defiance of his state-wide directive ordering them to restrict voting hours to weekdays only. Dennis Lieberman and Thomas J. Ritchie, Sr. were suspended immediately after voting to expand the board’s hours and defended themselves at a hearing last week.

Husted introduced the standardized voting schedule as an attempt to appease the outrage over his intervention restricting the voting hours in Democrat-leaning urban counties. But instead of simply allowing all 88 boards of elections to open on weekends, Husted decreed no one could. The Montgomery County Democrats immediately revolted, followed by a symbolic gesture by the commissioners of Mahoning County and a request from Republican-heavy Medina County to reevaluate the ban on weekend voting hours.

Husted recently backed out of a planned appearance with former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell, who was mired in accusations of disenfranchisement after Ohio’s chaotic 2004 election, at a Tea Party event hosted by vote-suppression group True the Vote. Husted’s decision to restrict voting hours has come under even more scrutiny after the chairman of the Franklin County Republican Party warned that expanding hours would “accommodate the urban — read African-American — voter-turnout machine.”

This isn’t the first time Husted has come into conflict with these two election officials. Lieberman and Ritchie voted against Husted’s tenuous claim of residency when he was a state representative in 2009. Husted survived the vote.

The two Democrats may choose to sue over their firing, adding to the pile of lawsuits against Husted’s office, including the Obama campaign’s effort to restore voting on the last weekend before the election. Most recently, Husted was sued by his Democratic predecessor, Jennifer Brunner, over the directive to limit hours.

There’s still a fair amount of lingering mistrust among Tea Partiers toward Mitt Romney — just this Monday, Romney failed to generate much enthusiasm at a rally explicitly designed to get members of the right-wing movement fired up about the Romney campaign. But Romney adviser Ron Kaufman is convinced that Romney, far from being an outsider, “actually is the Tea Party movement.” ThinkProgress caught up with Kaufman at the GOP convention and asked him what he thought about his boss’ relationship with the Tea party. Here’s what he had to say:

KAUFMAN: He is the ideal Tea Party candidate…forget about attributes, let’s put a resume on the table for who should be the next President of the United States from your [Tea Party] Perspective. You get all that, and at the end of the day you get Mitt Romney’s resume. Someone who’s not of Washington, never worked in Washington, etc. Someone who cares about the economy, someone who can fix problems, he’s the perfect Tea Party Candidate.

THINKPROGRESS: Do you think if he’s elected President, that Tea Parties will be able to count on him in the White House?

KAUFMAN: Count on him in terms of what? …I guarantee you this: he will be the most fiscally conservative — make this government work better, reduce the debt, reduce taxes, create jobs — President in history. That’s exactly what they want. And they can count on that.

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Kaufman’s position (which Romney himself has pushed before) isn’t widely held among Tea Partiers, who vehemently opposed Romney’s candidacy at the outset of the primary campaign. Influential Tea Party Group FreedomWorks called him an “establishment hack” and organized a rally against him, while Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) labelled him “NewtRomney” to signify his Washington insider status. Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin said it “will be a big challenge” for Romney to attract Tea Party votes and Herman Cain openly questioned whether Romney’s religion would limit his appeal among the movement’s southern base. Indeed, Romney failed to attract many votes from self-describe Tea Party voters in the primary until he became the clear favorite to win.

Or, as Dustin Stockman, proprietor of TeaPartyNet.com, put it at the tepid Monday rally: “I think we’re still warming up to Romney…Frankly he wasn’t most of our first or second choices.”

In an interview Monday with Politico, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer (R) accused the president of race-baiting and pandering to Hispanic voters. Brewer, whose name has become synonymous with the draconian and now mostly invalidated immigration law she fought for, lashed out at perceived allegations of Republican bigotry. When directly asked if she thought Obama was intentionally race-baiting, she vehemently agreed:

BREWER: It’s all the time, that we’re race-baiting. It’s all the time, you know, that we’re bigots.
POLITICO: Do you think the president is purposely race-baiting on the issue of immigration?
BREWER: I do, I absolutely do. There’s no doubt in my mind. He panders to them.

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Brewer accused Obama of ignoring border security, in spite of the fact the number of border patrol agents has more than doubled since 2004. The governor also took aim at the Department of Justice’s recently installed hotline for any Arizonans who feel their civil rights have been violated, scoffing, “Oh, come on. That’s wrong.”

Obama and the Arizona governor have butted heads over immigration before. Brewer unsuccessfully tried to subvert Obama’s immigration directive, explicitly ordering state agencies to “deny driver’s licenses and other public benefits to young illegal immigrants who obtain work authorizations.”

Brewer’s comments are in line with Mitt Romney’s latest accusation that Obama is pandering to his welfare-loving base. The Romney campaign seems to have given up on winning over minority voters, even though, as the National Journal points out, he would need to carry 61 percent of white voters to make up for it.

When Hurricane Isaac showed a looming threat of hitting Tampa, Florida, during the GOP convention, Romney campaign co-chair and former New Hampshire Gov. John Sununu told Fox News, “we’ll keep hoping that Isaac moves as far west as he can.”

Now that the storm has moved west — and is on the same trajectory as Hurricane Katrina, the storm that devastated New Orleans in 2005 — Sununu complained on Fox News today that the media is “obsessed with mother nature” and is unfairly covering the storm instead of the convention:

SUNUNU: We aren’t talking about jobs. It’s the media that is obsessed with mother nature. This is a jobs campaign. 8.3 unemployment, 25 million Americans underemployed or unemployed, and college graduates, half of them can’t find decent jobs. But each of the last four years, it is jobs.

KILMEADE: But you have to admit for the last week it is Medicare, and we’ve been talking a lot about that. No one can help if there is a storm coming. We’ve got to talk that.

SUNUNU: But it is jobs, Governor Romney is the guy to fix the job’s program.

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Sununu’s callousness has been echoed by other members of his party. Rep Darryl Issa (R-CA) said he’d be “fine” if Isaac made landfall in New Orleans, as long as Republicans could win in November, and radio host Rush Limbaugh suggested yesterday that President Obama intentionally messed with the storm track predictions of Isaac to scare Republicans into canceling their convention.