I’m starting to lose count of all the failed attacks against Romney. Some of them have been kind of funny, like Seamus the Dog That Obama Never Got to Eat. But the latest attack ad from Priorities USA Action, Obama’s super PAC, is perhaps not so amusing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nj70XqOxptUThere’s only one thing wrong with this ad: everything.
You know you’ve messed up when CNN calls bull$#!+ on your ad even though you’re Democrats.
But wait, it gets worse. Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter claims she doesn’t know anything about this disgustingly false ad. But Joe Soptic, the man in the ad, told the same story in an Obama For America press call hosted by Cutter last May:
That’s Cutter at the end, thanking Soptic for telling the story she now claims to know nothing about.
On top of that, Soptic was also featured in an Obama ad subtly titled “Vampire”:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhQlnx1NSUwAgain, this is the same man the Obama campaign now claims to know nothing about.
And incidentally, Soptic has publicly admitted that Bain offered him a buyout:
Sounds to me like they tried to do right by him. They didn’t just throw him out in the street.
So whether or not Soptic realizes it, the ad is a sleazy misrepresentation of the facts, making the ridiculous accusation that Bain Capital closing a steel plant caused someone’s death of cancer years later. And now they can’t even admit to making that accusation:
Shorter Bill Burton: “It’s silly to think we’re blaming Mitt Romney for this woman’s death. We’re just saying her death is the result of what Mitt Romney did.”
I can understand why a man who’s still grieving the loss of his wife would want someone to blame, no matter how baseless and illogical the accusation is. What I don’t understand is how anyone could exploit that man to try to cling to power.
But that’s the Obama campaign for you.
Bryan Preston sums it up:
The ad is out there. The uninformed are seeing it in their Facebook feeds, twinned up with the latest from MoveOn or whichever smear group is running in parallel today. People will see the ad, and most of them will not see the CNN, PolitiFact or Washington Post fact-checks that declare the ad a total fraud. Out in the wild, the ad is intended do its job of toxifying Romney just enough to peel off a few of his voters and ramp up hate for him among Obama’s voters. That’s the point of the ad, not to tell anything that’s true, but just to stir the pot, sully Romney and depress his potential vote.
As I wrote yesterday, we’re dealing with something in the Obama campaign that we haven’t seen much at the top of American life, except in the worst moments of the Clinton era. We’re dealing with a president who is entirely without any sense of ethics, honor or morals. He has lived a lie for most if not all of his life, hiding his true political convictions in gauzy language that makes him appear reasonable and moderate. Having lived a lie, what’s one more lie, in the service of keeping himself in power? What’s one more lie if, in Obama’s mind, it accomplishes the “good” of keeping Romney out of power?
The danger for the Obama camp is that they risk going over a tipping point. There is a point at which the negativity becomes absurd, and instead of depressing the opponent’s vote, angers the opponent’s supporters and draws the undecided over to the opponent’s side. No one can really put a finger on where that point is, but it’s real and we saw the effect of reaching that point in the Texas Senate run-off last week. The Dewhurst campaign went too far into negative territory, no one really believed their last-minute attacks, and the backlash ended up ensuring that Cruz would win running away. Obama risks the same dynamic hitting him.
If this ad doesn’t do it, stick around. We’ve got 12 more weeks until the election. Obama has not yet begun to stoop.
(Hat tip: Washington Examiner, Washington Beacon, Hot Air, Ace of Spades, and Gateway Pundit)
P.S. Et tu, Mika?
P.P.S. Courtesy of Business Insider, here’s Cutter directly quoting Soptic last May:
“They made as much as money as they could and they closed it down.”- former GST Steel worker on Romney’s biz model: romneyeconomics.com
— Stephanie Cutter (@stefcutter) May 14, 2012
That was back when his pain was still of some use to her. That’s over now.
