The 2012 presidential election is 22 days away and the attack ads from the Obama campaign appear to be getting more and more ridiculous. While this latest one titled “Don’t be Fooled” seems to be more substantive and issue-focused than, say, last week’s laughable Big Bird ad, viewers beware: there is more than meets the eye.
“Don’t be Fooled” is the latest video attempt by the Barack Obama “Truth Team” to paint GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper. Average Joes are seen reading off of cue cards in a “man-on-the-street” style interview in which they are asked to read two seemingly contradicting Romney statements on a single issue.
But a closer look at these Romney claims reveals that it is the Obama reelection campaign that is trying to pull the wool over the viewers’ eyes.
“We asked people to compare Mitt Romney’s real positions with the ones he’s claimed to support in the final weeks of the campaign,” the text reads at the beginning of the ad. The ad continues with various men and women reading statements from Romney about abortion, preexisting conditions for health insurance, and tax breaks for high-income taxpayers.
But viewers are never able to see the statements from which these participants are reading, let alone given context for the claims made. There are no citations, references or sources for any statements read that viewers could then corroborate or investigate on their own.
Instead, when Romney appears to have contradicted himself on the issue of abortion, the people in the ad look shocked and upset, doubting him as a man of his word. “That is really, really scary,” said one older woman. “I don’t trust his new position,” said another. “People don’t change so the recent one would probably not be what he stands for,” said another gentleman.
However, Romney may not have “changed” his position on abortion at all. “This week Romney said, ‘There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda’,” one woman read off of a card. “But in June Romney said, ‘I support the reversal of Roe V. Wade because it’s a bad law and bad medicine,” said another woman.
Upon closer inspection, however, these statements don’t actually contradict one another. Romney may not have a stated policy in his agenda to deal with the issue of abortion perhaps because he is more focused right now upon improving the economy and creating jobs. That does not mean Romney does not have a position on abortion, just that it’s not stated in, or a focus of his reelection agenda. When Romney issued the statement on Roe v. Wade in June, perhaps he answered the direct question of a reporter who asked him if he had a position on Roe v. Wade and he was simply being honest with the reporter.
But with no context, how can viewers know that what they’re hearing is the truth? Voters, “don’t be fooled” by this tricky Obama ad. A little context and some transparency would go a long way to revealing the truth behind what Romney said, but truth and transparency aren’t things we can expect from Obama and his reelection team.
