Team Obama on Romney: “Let’s kill this guy!”
**Posted by Phineas
New Tone alert!
Remember when it was a mortal sin for Sarah Palin’s PAC to use crosshairs on a poster depicting targeted races in 2010?
That was then, this is now:
On a mission to shatter the image of her husband as rigid and unrelatable, Ann Romney told CBS News she worries that President Obama’s entire campaign strategy is “kill Romney.”
“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.
“I feel like Mitt’s got the answers to turn this country around,” she continued. “He’s the one that’s got to bring back hope for this country, which is what they ran on last time. But the truth is, this is the one that has the hope for the – for America.”
In 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.”
And there you have the Left’s strategy for this election: they can’t talk about the economy, and health care reform is too risky to campaign on (regardless of what some say), so all the Democrats, the media, and the activist Left (but I repeat myself) are left with lies about the opposition’s record and character assassination — “killing the guy.”
This isn’t something new, either. When Palin was introduced to America and wowed the nation, the Democrat/media complex set out to destroy her. In 2008 the media colluded to smear those who wanted to dig into Obama’s background. Slanderous rumors were spread about John McCain cheating on his wife, which turned out to have no basis in fact. In 2004, false documents and flat-out lies were spread about George W. Bush’s military service. And in election after election, Republican presidential candidates (and presidents) are derided as “stupid,” going at least as far back as Eisenhower.
There’s another reason Democrats constantly resort to the tactics of personal smear: not only does it provide a distraction from their failures, but, as Dennis Praeger writes, hate works:
Since Stalin labeled Leon Trotsky — the man who was the father of Russian Bolshevism! — a “fascist,” the Left has labeled its ideological opponents evil. And when you control nearly all of the news media and schools, that labeling works.
The liberal media even succeeded in blaming the right wing for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy even though his assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was a pro-Soviet, pro-Castro communist. Similarly, just one day after a deranged man, Jared Loughner, attempted to kill Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and murdered six people in the process, The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman wrote that it was right-wing hate that had provoked Loughner: “It’s the saturation of our political discourse — and especially our airwaves — with eliminationist rhetoric that lies behind the rising tide of violence. Where’s that toxic rhetoric coming from? Let’s not make a false pretense of balance: it’s coming, overwhelmingly, from the right. . . .”
Krugman made it all up. But what matters to most of those who speak for the left is not truth. It is destroying the good name of its opponents. That is the modus operandi of the left.
It works.
And because it works, you can bet the Obama campaign will use it more and more, especially if the economy stays in the doldrums or gets worse. Ann Romney may find herself “playing bodyguard” far more than even she expects.
(Crossposted at Public Secrets)