“Somebody was challenging one of their ads. They just they made it up about work and welfare. And every outlet said this was just not true. They were asked about it, and a campaign person said, we won’t have the fact checkers dictate our campaign plan. We will not let the truth get in the way.”
~President Obama
President Obama spoke today to a crowd of 7,500 (mostly) students at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville; he went after Mitt Romney and his campaign for their transparently dishonest approach to this campaign. Powerful speech and the crowd in Virginia seemed very energized. President Obama made it clear that the Romney campaign’s entire approach is simply to lie (although he didn’t use those words). I simply would never vote for a campaign that is as transparently dishonest as the Romney campaign. They have NO SHAME in their lies. They lie repeatedly and it’s because they think you’re too stupid to know the difference.
I have already fully explained my thoughts around the Romney’s decision to go full Willie Horton on President Obama; you can read more about that in “Yes. Mitt Romney is Running a Campaign With Racist Undertones” and “Romney Aide: ‘We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by the fact checkers‘.”
The National Journal explains in great detail what the Romney campaign is doing with their dishonest racially charged ads HERE:
Before explaining why these tactics work (and why Romney’s team knows, or should know, they are playing the race card), let’s quickly deal with this fact: The ad is wrong. As countless impartial fact-checkers have noted, the Obama administration memo cited by the Romney team actually gives states flexibility to find better ways of getting welfare recipients into jobs.
Why ignore fact-checkers? First, internal GOP polling and focus groups offer convincing evidence that the welfare ad is hurting Obama. Second, the welfare issue, generally speaking, triggers anger in white blue-collar voters that is easily directed toward Democrats. This information comes from senior GOP strategists who have worked both for President Bush and Romney. They spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid retribution.
Furthermore, a senior GOP pollster said he has shared with the Romney camp surveys showing that white working-class voters who backed Obama in 2008 have moved to Romney in recent weeks “almost certainly because of the welfare ad. We’re talking a (percentage) point or two, but that could be significant.”
Some other comments from President Obama’s speech today that I thought were relevant and powerful:
”You can prove the cynics wrong one more time. But the other side will spend the next two months spending more money than we have ever seen in our lives — an avalanche of attack ads and insults, distractions — and sometimes they just make things up. But they’ve got a bunch of folks who can write $10 million checks. And they’ll just keep on running them. ”
You can view the entire speech below:
