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Misquoting Obama Is A Big Gamble for Mitt Romney

As anyone who pays much attention to politics or watches  late night TV or reads the Fact Checker portion of the paper knows, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney  is getting blasted for an ad that uses a quote from Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign (“If  we keep talking about the economy we are going to lose”) and attributes it to  President Obama.

The original ad has become a several-day news story,  resulting in  dueling TV spots, and numerous punch/counter-punch action from the   campaigns and party committees.

It plays into the narrative that Romney is prepared to say  anything  or do anything to become president. Flip flops have become one big   character flop, as have misleading ads.

But here’s the question:  is Romney willing to do anything he can  right now to engage Obama in a  one-on-one confrontation, even if he  gets criticized by the mainstream media? Is he sacrificing his rook to  get a chance at  the king?

Here is the cynical view:  the Romney campaign knew exactly what it  was doing with this ad. It focused on the one issue where Romney  seems  to have an advantage with Republican primary voters, the economy, and  it  took on the person they hate the most, Obama.  But they needed  something extra to see to it that the ad went viral and  became  controversial.

Without this quote taken out of context, edited and made to  sound as  though it was an Obama statement, the ad probably would have gone   nowhere. Ho-hum.

In my many years in campaigns I have seen the tactic over  and over  again. A candidate and his or  her consultants deliberately mislead to  get the opponent to take the bait. For example, one cynical tactic is  to  misrepresent the facts deliberately. You  accuse candidate X, who  was a prosecutor, of “plea bargaining” over 200 cases  and letting  criminals go free. So, the  number may be 120—your hope is to have an  argument over the number, thereby  “winning” the message debate. Pretty   horrendous.

My guess is that the Romney campaign knew they were going to  get  attacked for butchering the quote (they even had the full quote  mentioning  McCain in their material) but figured that they would rather  create the  firestorm with Obama and the Democrats.  It was a gamble,  to be sure.

The problem is that the DNC is staying on this and feeding  it into  the narrative of Romney’s character (along with the flip flops) and   this is probably hurting Romney even among Republicans. So, in the end, the ad is a  gamble that may not pay off,  especially if former Speaker of the House  Newt Gingrich begins to suck the oxygen out of the room in  debates and  taps into the demise of Herman Cain and Gov. Rick Perry.

By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, November 29, 2011

November 30, 2011 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , | Leave a comment

“That’s His Voice”: Willard Romney’s Integrity Problem

I really didn’t intend to return to the subject, but the latest defense from the Romney campaign for its transparent lying is too extraordinary to overlook.

To briefly recap, Mitt Romney’s very first television ad of the 2012 campaign pushes a blatant, shameless lie. In 2008, a month before the president was elected, then-candidate Obama told voters, “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.’” In Romney’s new attack ad, viewers only see part of the quote: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

It’s a cheap, deceitful move, suggesting Romney wants to get his general-election strategy off to as dishonorable a start as possible. And what’s the Republican campaign’s response? It’s a doozy.

Romney senior New Hampshire adviser Tom Rath tells CBS News the ad is “exactly what we want.” […]

Pressed on whether it was unfair to lop off the top of Mr. Obama’s comments — which would show the president was quoting the McCain camp — Rath said, “He did say the words. That’s his voice.”

There’s no way around this — the argument is just blisteringly stupid. Yes, Obama said those words, and yes, that’s the president’s voice, but the whole point of the controversy is that Romney wrenched the words from context, changing the meaning and deceiving the public.

It’s why ThinkProgress put together a video of Romney saying all kinds of interesting things, which, when taken out of context, show the former governor calling for higher taxes, insisting that there’s nothing unique about the United States, arguing that government knows better than free people, and rejecting the very idea of fiscal responsibility.

In each instance, to use Tom Rath’s reasoning, Romney “did say the words,” and that is Romney’s “voice.”

ABC News’ Jake Tapper said of Romney’s ad, “[I]t’s not just misleading. It’s TV-station-refuse-to-air-it-misleading.”

Agreed. Romney’s willingness to lie to voters raises important questions about his integrity, but the question now becomes whether television stations will participate in the lie by airing a spot that’s proven to be deceptive.

By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly, November 22, 2011

November 23, 2011 Posted by | GOP Presidential Candidates, Media | , , , , | 1 Comment

Rick Perry And His Rivals Serve Up Scare Tactics And Drivel

Rick Perry should have backed off. Instead, he doubled down, and in a way that was doubly illuminating — about Perry himself and the degraded state of modern politics.

The issue, amazingly enough, is President Obama’s birthplace — months after the release of his long-form birth certificate should have laid the matter to rest.

In an interview with Parade magazine, the Texas governor declared Obama’s place of birth a “distractive” issue even as he happily latched on to the opportunity to distract.

“Well, I don’t have a definitive answer [about whether Obama was born in the United States], because he’s never seen my birth certificate,” he said. It was classic Perry, combining logical incoherence and a smarmy cheap shot.

A smarter candidate would have stopped there. Perry, in an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, kept going, despite Harwood’s repeated invitations to walk back his silliness.

“Look, I haven’t seen his,” Perry said. “I haven’t seen his grades. My grades ended up on the front page of the newspaper, so let’s, you know, if we’re going to show stuff, let’s show stuff. “

Is this a presidential campaign or a middle-school playground? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours? By the way, if I had Perry’s grades, I wouldn’t be mentioning them. Certainly not if I were running against a former president of the Harvard Law Review.

But then Perry, as is his style, let on what this was really about. “But look, that’s all a distraction. I mean, I get it. I’m really not worried about the president’s birth certificate. It’s fun to poke at him a little bit and say, ‘Hey, how about, let’s see your grades and your birth certificate.’ ”

The matter of the president’s birthplace, Perry added, is “a good issue to keep alive.”

You might think this was the candidate cannily trying to have it both ways: a nod to the birther crazies with a simultaneous wink at those who know this is a ridiculous distraction. Except that Perry managed to step on his real message of the day: his unaffordable and unfair proposal to “simplify” the tax code — by grafting a flat-tax alternative onto the existing system.

Perry’s acknowledgment of his interest in benefiting from birther mania was reminiscent of his artless dodge, during the last debate, about whether he thought the 14th Amendment should be changed to abolish birthright citizenship. “You get to ask the questions,” he told moderator Anderson Cooper. “I get to answer like I want to.”

Note to candidate: It’s better not to narrate your own stage directions. Just because your debate coaches tell you to answer the question you want to answer, not the one that’s been asked, doesn’t mean you should announce that’s what you’re up to.

Now we have Perry, who has a decent if fading shot at the Republican presidential nomination, openly practicing politics as poke-fest. The point isn’t to debate whose solutions are best for America — it’s to get under the other guy’s skin.

Thus Perry needling Mitt Romney on immigration: “You hired illegals in your home and you knew about it for a year. And the idea that you stand here before us and talk about that you’re strong on immigration is, on its face, the height of hypocrisy.”

As it happens, Perry is righter — that is, more correct — than Romney on immigration, at least when it comes to the question of the DREAM Act and the ability of the children of illegal immigrants to obtain in-state tuition rates.

But Perry’s jab at Romney was below the belt. The former Massachusetts governor employed a landscaping firm that, the Boston Globe discovered, had hired illegal immigrants. Romney told it to stop. When it turned out that the company hadn’t, he fired the firm.

The matter of Obama’s birth certificate should be a closed case. It is astonishing that a sitting governor, no less a serious candidate for president, would stoop to playing this game.

Then again, 2012 is shaping up to be an astonishing campaign. Witness Herman Cain’s bizarre, substance-less new ad in which the candidate is endorsed by, yes, the candidate’s campaign manager. Who is actually smoking (literally) during the ad.

“I really believe that Herman Cain will put United back in the United States of America,” says the aide, Mark Block.

The country is facing serious problems. This will be a fateful election. Voters deserve better than scare tactics and drivel.

By: Ruth Marcus, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, October 25, 2011

October 29, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Conservatives, Democracy, Elections, GOP, Ideologues, Ideology, President Obama, Republicans, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Incentive Behind GOP Obstructionism

At first blush, it’s tempting to think congressional Republicans are simply out of their minds to kill jobs bills during a jobs crisis. It seems insane — Americans are desperate for Congress to act; Americans overwhelmingly support bills like the one considered by the Senate last night; and yet GOP officials seem wholly unconcerned. Aren’t they afraid of a backlash?

Well, no, probably not. The reason probably has something to do with voters like Dale Bartholomew.

Now, my point is not to pick on one random voter quoted in an Associated Press article. He’s very likely a well-intentioned guy who’s simply frustrated with what’s going on in Washington. I certainly don’t blame him for that.

Consider, though, the significance of a quote like this one.

“If Romney and Obama were going head to head at this point in time I would probably move to Romney,” said Dale Bartholomew, 58, a manufacturing equipment salesman from Marengo, Ill. Bartholomew said he agrees with Obama’s proposed economic remedies and said partisan divisions have blocked the president’s initiatives.

But, he added: “His inability to rally the political forces, if you will, to accomplish his goal is what disappoints me.”

Got that? This private citizen agrees with Obama, but is inclined to vote for Romney anyway — even though Romney would move the country in the other direction — because the president hasn’t been able to “rally the political forces” to act sensibly in Washington.

That is heartbreaking, but it’s important — Republicans have an incentive, not only to hold the country back on purpose, but also to block every good idea, even the ones they agree with, because they assume voters will end up blaming the president in the end. And here’s a quote from a guy who makes it seem as if the GOP’s assumptions are correct.

It’s hard to say just how common this sentiment is, but it doesn’t seem uncommon. The public likes to think of the President of the United States, no matter who’s in office, as having vast powers. He or she is “leader of the free world.” He or she holds the most powerful office on the planet. If the president — any president — wants a jobs bill, it must be within his or her power to simply get one to the Oval Office to be signed into law.

And when the political system breaks down, and congressional Republicans kill ideas that are worthwhile and popular, there’s an assumption that the president is somehow to blame, even if that doesn’t make any sense at all. Indeed, here we have a quote from a voter who is inclined to reward Republicans, giving them more power, even though the voter agrees with Obama — whose ideas (and presidency) Republicans are actively trying to destroy.

As Greg Sargent, who first flagged the quote in the AP article, explained: “Voters either don’t understand, or they don’t care, that the GOP has employed an unprecedented level of filibustering in order to block all of Obama’s policies, even ones that have majority public support from Dems, independents and Republicans alike. Their reaction, in a nutshell, seems to be: The Obama-led government isn’t acting on the economy? Obama can’t get his policies passed? Well, he must be weak.”

The challenge for the president isn’t to teach Civics 101 to the populace; that would take too long. The task at hand is communicating who deserves credit for fighting to make things better, and who deserves blame for standing in the way.

Because if voters who agree with Obama are inclined to vote for Republicans because Republicans are blocking Obama’s ideas, then not only is 2012 lost, but the descent of American politics into hysterical irrationality is complete.

 

By: Steve Benen, Washington Monthly Political Animal, October 21, 2011

October 22, 2011 Posted by | Class Warfare, Congress, Conservatives, Democracy, Democrats, Economic Recovery, GOP, Government, Ideologues, Middle Class, Public, Right Wing, Teaparty | , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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