by Chas Danner
Yesterday Mitt Romney responded to the Priorities USA Bain-cancer ad, or rather, responded to the fact it was still on the air:
“You know, in the past, when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney said on the radio. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead. You know, the various fact checkers look at some of these charges in the Obama ads and they say that they’re wrong, and inaccurate, and yet he just keeps on running them.”
Of course there's no chance the Romney campaign will start taking down the numerous ads they've run that journalists and fact checkers have deemed misleading or false. Instead this is, as Greg Sargent notes, yet another example of how deeply cynical the campaign is. Kevin Drum, responding to the seemingly controlled uproar over the Bain-cancer ad, is depressed:
On both sides, the base will flip out if they feel their candidate is being too meek or too moderate. Likewise, they'll cheer (sometimes publicly, sometimes privately) if their candidate bludgeons the other guy harder or throws out some policy red meat. Obama bludgeoned the other guy harder, so lefties cheered in private and mostly left him alone in public. Romney seemingly moved a bit toward the center, so righties flipped out. These are two entirely different things, and both sides reacted according to script. It says nothing one way or the other about how well the campaigns are keeping their supporters in line.
And many reporters will simply play along, as Jay Rosen recently pointed out when responding to a piece by WaPo's Aaron Blake, in which Blake essentially complimented the Romney campaign's "Didn't Build That" and "It Worked" attack strategies, not because they were accurate, which he acknowledged they weren't, but because they would likely "work" on voters:
From Blake’s point of view, the story that needs to be told is not about the granularity of deception, the misuse of words to make them mean what they did not mean when spoken, or the tricky matter of which side is relying to a greater degree on truth-busting, context-shredding claims. The real story lies in the game of it all: the daily routine of scoring points, landing blows, seizing on any little advantage and making it work for your side. “Acumen,” as he put it.
What this all unfortunately may mean is that the campaigns, their supporters, and the press see almost the entire political process as nothing but an athletic bullshit competition.
The Dish 