Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game

[babylonsister]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/05/19/michael-tomasky-on-mitt-romney-s-character-assassination-game.html

Michael Tomasky on Mitt Romney’s Character Assassination Game
by Michael Tomasky May 19, 2012 4:45 AM EDT
Republicans specialize in accusing opponents of the dirty tricks they themselves are doing—or planning to do. Exhibit A: Romney accusing Obama of “character assassination.”



The secret of Republican political success since the rise of the right is not, as many liberals believe, that they play no-rules hardball. Instead, it’s their skill at projection—at accusing Democrats of doing what they are doing themselves, or are planning to do, or have done. That’s the real Rosetta stone. And that’s what Mitt Romney did this week when he called Barack Obama’s tough, but hardly extraordinary, ads about Bain Capital “character assassination.” He’s trying to make it so that Bain as a subject becomes off limits, and he’s laying the groundwork for later, when the real character assassination starts—and I hope your memory isn’t so short that you forget that he knows a thing or two about the topic himself.

Republicans have perfected many a dark campaign art over the years, from racial nudging and winking to suggesting that we’ll all be killed by terrorists if voters elect Democrats. But projection is the darkest art of all. And it’s so simple! When Republicans are acting like a mob—down in Dade County, for example—they accuse the Democrats of having a mob mentality. When they’re planning on blowing holes in the budget deficit bigger than the one the iceberg laid on the Titanic, via Paul Ryan’s budget and tax cuts for the rich, they stand up and accuse the Democrats of blowing holes in the budget. It works pretty well, too. All the conservative blogs pick up on it, and Fox and so on. And then, when the mainstream media sit down to write about the subject at hand, stories will note that “The GOP has been saying for months…”

This is what is happening here. Romney is trying to do two things. First, he’s trying to make any criticism of his Bain record out of bounds. Aware of course that he’s been forced by reality to revise downward from “more than 100,000” to “thousands” the number of jobs he helped create at Bain, he knows that he can’t use Bain as a plus to the extent that he wanted to. Think about it—the cornerstone of his career, the thing he spent 15 years of his life doing, the business he built (with Mr. Bain’s blessing and seed money)—pretty much out the window now. So that being the case, he needs to eliminate it as a minus. See if the referee will toss it out, if the judge (the media) will rule it inadmissible.

snip//

Don’t forget, finally, that Romney is pretty adept at character assassination himself. What do you call it when in those crucial primaries that he barely won against Rick Santorum—Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—he was outspending Santorum six and nine and 12 to one with incredibly negative ads? Or the “tsunami of sleaze,” as my colleague John Avlon put it at the time that the Romney campaign dumped on Newt Gingrich in Florida, where 92 percent of the aired TV ads were negative? Those gutter attacks, aired over and over and over, are, it is worth remembering, the main reason the guy is the nominee. He was tied or behind in all those states until he emptied the trash. He wasn’t winning them over with his wit.

So it’s a bit rich to hear him saying now that he’s sad to see Obama in the gutter and he’s going to keep it on the up and up. But at some point, he’ll attack. And when he does, he’ll sigh sadly and say that he was forced into this position by that mean Obama, and he’ll count on everyone to forget the primary season, the foulest one by far in the modern history of American politics, for which the man who neither drinks nor swears bears the vast majority of the blame. That, come to think of it, is a “character” issue too.

[emulatorloo]

1. When Republicans take Republican 101, Projection is the first lesson.

They are constantly accusing others of doing what THEY are actually doing.

When Romney said Obama is engaging in character assassination, I just laughed. So transparent.

And yet no mainstream media report on his statement bothered to scratch the surface of it.

Other than on MSNBC.

Romney's entire primary strategy was character assassination. "The other guy is worse than me"

His general election strategy is the same. Every word out of his mouth is an egregious lie about Obama.

Rove's got a multimillion dollar swiftboat ad going now.

Strategy: Try to drive down the President's positive numbers.



Thanks so much for posting this article.

Needs to go to the greatest page and stay at the top of the list for the rest of election season.

[Bake]

2. Try as he may, Bain will STILL be an issue.

The more he cries about it being off-limits, the more people will want to know about it.

Bake

[madinmaryland]

3. He is running on his business background, yet he feels that his business background should be off

limits to criticizm. What an elitist douchebag.

[Bake]

4. Team Obama came out this afternoon and said they're not backing down!

Yes!



Bake

[siligut]

5. Give them an inch and they will take a mile

They scream bloody murder at anything they think might hurt them. They are liars, cheaters, shameless and entitled mental midgets, they have to make the rules because otherwise they can never win.