President Obama’s super PAC has been running an ad in which a worker laid off when Bain Capital closed his factory connects his resulting loss of health care with the inability of his wife to obtain treatment for the cancer that killed her. The ad has been criticized by independent fact-checkers for being, at best, misleading. This is how Romney responded yesterday, according to Politico.com:
“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.”
Now, I think the super PAC should stop running this ad. The connection between Bain Capital’s closing of the factory and the women’s death is quite attenuated. But Romney is acting as if his campaign has been running principled, policy-oriented commercials instead of presiding over what is quickly becoming the most dishonest one in American history. His very first television commercial, run during the GOP primary contest, was one in which Obama is shown making what would be an embarrassing statement. That statement, however, was from 2008 when Obama was quoting the McCain campaign. When Romney was called on this blatant distortion, his campaign seemed to revel in living in a “post-truth” world.
Tom Noonan 