After days of criticism for its first ad attacking President Obama, Mitt Romney’s campaign team is vowing more such ads, and more fights, in the future. Romney aides know some Republicans fear that if Romney is the GOP presidential nominee, he might run a cautious, measured campaign against Obama like John McCain’s losing effort of 2008. They know Republicans want to see a fearless, all-out campaign against the president. In that sense, the first ad was an effort to show Republicans that Romney will be as tough as he needs to be. And Team Romney views the furious Democratic pushback against the ad — focused on its out-of-context use of an Obama soundbite from 2008 — as an effort to intimidate Romney from making hard-hitting ads in the future. They vow it won’t work.
The ad quotes Obama saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” Obama did say that during an October 2008 campaign appearance in New Hampshire, but he was quoting an anonymous McCain aide, quoted in the press: “Senator McCain’s campaign actually said, and I quote, ‘if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose,'” Obama said.
The ad caused an uproar in media circles, and Democrats from the party committee to White House spokesman Jay Carney joined in the criticism. But one Romney adviser calls it “incredibly telling” that Democratic criticism focused almost entirely on the use of the soundbite, and not on the substance of the ad itself, which was high unemployment. “This is how these guys operate,” the aide says of Team Obama. “This is how they shamelessly reduced Bill Clinton to sputtering that he wasn’t a racist. This is how they attacked Hillary for not having a core, for saying anything to get elected — the same Hillary who hosted Senator Obama’s largest fundraiser.”
“We get that and get how to get under their skin,” the aide continued. That fact that not just Obama campaign aides in Chicago but White House spokesman Carney joined in the pushback was, to Team Romney, a sign the Obama team was “rattled.”
“We get it,” said the aide. “We will tie them in knots.”
There’s little doubt the use of the Obama quote in Romney’s first ad — which played only for a short time and only in New Hampshire — was a deliberate provocation from the Romney campaign. On November 21, the Romney press shop sent out a release announcing the ad and detailing where each of its soundbites came from. The press release made clear — as the ad itself did not — that the Obama soundbite in question came from a speech in which Obama was quoting that anonymous McCain aide. Romney’s spokeswoman Gail Gitcho, wrote a blog post on the same day explaining that “the tables have turned” and that Obama today is doing the same thing he accused McCain of doing in 2008 — avoiding the topic of the economy.
Has that deliberate provocation backfired on Romney? It certainly produced a wave of criticism, but it appears the ad was directed at Republicans as much as Obama, with the Romney campaign wanting to send a signal that it would not run a go-along, get-along campaign against Obama, as some Republicans believe McCain did. If that was Romney’s intention, he certainly made his point.
