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Hyperbole Much?
Author: Raine    Date: 07/05/2012 16:09:49

This morning, CBS news published an article titled:

Ann Romney: Obama's whole campaign strategy is "let's kill this guy"

Some interesting snippets:
"I feel like all he's doing is saying, 'Let's kill this guy," she said, seated next to her husband, presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, in an exclusive interview with CBS News chief political correspondent Jan Crawford. "And I feel like that's not really a very good campaign policy. (snip)

Ann Romney said it's all part of a plan to portray her husband "in a light that is just completely wrong... they don't' get him at all." Pressed by Crawford on what qualities in her husband she sees most misrepresented, she said, that "he's not as approachable as I am or something like that. That's like, really kind of funny to me because it's all - it's all backwards."

"That'll change," Mitt Romney assured her. "That'll come with time."
We are four months away from election day. Four Months. Time is running out for Rmoney.

But let's get back to this *killing idea*. CBS suggests that this meme came from last August.
...some Democratic strategists let leak to the press that Obama's top aides were looking at a massive character takedown of Romney in light of a deterring economy; "kill Romney" was a phrase used by one. "That was their memo that came out from their campaign," Ann Romney said. "And it's like, 'not when I'm next to him you better not."
So it's like, you know, a meme that Ann Romney is repeating from an un-named source that Politico says are closely aligned with the White house:
“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”
I think we are all smart enough to know that the phrase he will have to kill Romney is a political metaphor. In sports, we like to use the phrase, We have to slaughter the other team, etc., you know the gist. . Here we are, 11 months later and Ms. Rmoney is saying: 'Let's kill this guy'?

I would say at this point, politically, the only political killing that is happening here is by Mitt Rmoney himself. After the SCOTUS ACA ruling, Mitt Romney himself said that the mandate was not a tax-- and then he flipped that statement:
Earlier this week, senior Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom told NBC’s Chuck Todd that the governor “disagrees with the Court’s ruling that the mandate was a tax.”

In a Wednesday interview with CBS, Romney reiterated his support for the Court’s dissenting opinion, which opposed the individual mandate, but added that “the majority of the court said it’s a tax, and therefore it is a tax.”
Then there was the Outsourcing = Offshoring moment:
On Friday, Romney campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul quickly criticized the Post for not adequately defining the two trends. "This is a fundamentally flawed story that does not differentiate between domestic outsourcing versus offshoring," Saul said.

On Sunday, Romney campaign strategist Eric Fehrnstrom advanced the outsourcing versus offshoring distinction, providing perfectly adequate definitions of both phenomenons. "There’s a very simple difference between outsourcing and offshoring,” Fehrnstrom said on CBS' "Face the Nation." "(Outsourcing) is done by companies every day. They take functions and they allow vendors to do it rather than handling it in-house. Offshoring is the shipment of American jobs overseas."

But to distance Romney from offshoring, Fehrnstrom ends up giving implicit approval to domestic outsourcing.
There was this humorous gaffe:
http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4vbhnbo7A1rxqttfo1_400.jpg
Who can forget this famous comment:
"I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes," Fehrnstrom responded. "It's almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up, and we start all over again."
$ 4 (sorry bad typo...) months away from the election is probably a bad time to start over, and yet the Romney campaign is actually using something the Obama campaign said 11 months ago and -- without a hint of Irony -- proving the Obama campaigns strategy completely correct. He has shown himself to be just that from the Politico article mentioned above:
“First, they’ve got to like you, and there’s not a lot to like about Mitt Romney,” said Chicago Democratic consultant Pete Giangreco, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign. “There’s no way to hide this guy and hide his innate phoniness.”

A senior Obama adviser was even more cutting, suggesting that the Republican’s personal awkwardness will turn off voters.

“There’s a weirdness factor with Romney, and it remains to be seen how he wears with the public,” the adviser said, noting that the contrasts they’d drive between the president and the former Massachusetts governor would be “based on character to a great extent.”
Then there is this image/inforgraphic released by the Obama campaign. it's too big to show here, but this is the title: Has Mitt Romney avoided U.S. taxes by investing millions in U.S. tax havens? The source of this information is this article from Vanity Fair:
Romney manages this low rate because he takes his payments from Bain Capital as investment income, which is taxed at a maximum 15 percent, instead of the 35 percent he would pay on “ordinary” income, such as salaries and wages. Many tax experts argue that the form of remuneration he receives, known as carried interest, is really just a fee charged by investment managers, so it should instead be taxed at the 35 percent rate. Lee Sheppard, a contributing editor at the trade publication Tax Notes, whose often controversial articles are read widely by tax professionals, is nonplussed that the Obama campaign has been so listless on the issue of carried interest. “Romney is the poster boy, the best argument, for taxing this profit share as ordinary income,” says Sheppard.

In the face of such arguments, Romney’s defense is that he never broke the rules: if there is a problem, it is in the laws, not in his behavior. “I pay all the taxes that are legally required, not a dollar more,” he said. Even so. “When you are running for president, you might want to err on the side of overpaying your taxes, and not chase every tax gimmick that comes down the pike,” says Sheppard. “It kind of looks tacky.”
Read the entire scribe if you haven't already. Please note that candidate Romney has no plans on changing the laws that allow him to offshore his money. He actually wants to loosen those regulations.

That's not killing - that is politics, and Romney has certainly proven this to be true all by himself. This is a presidential campaign where we as citizens are SUPPOSED to see the media vet the candidates. We have that responsibility as Americans to do so as well. This is vetting both politically and personally, and that is the essence of politics.

People want to LIKE who they are going to vote for, from a personal as well as a policy point of view. That has long been a political reality. The Romney's keep telling us to wait and see how awesome Mitt is, and we still aren't seeing it. So instead, they are choosing to project upon others a strangely hyperbolic spin from the Obama campaign. To say that Obama is trying to kill Romney is ridiculous. I suspect that some people will take this term literally...and perhaps that's why Ms.Romney chose to use that phrase. It helps to further inflame a portion of the conservative base. Maybe she was speaking to that.

That's just wierd.

and
Raine
 

53 comments (Latest Comment: 07/05/2012 23:38:45 by Will in Chicago)
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