November 23, 2011

Team Romney: The Media Adored Our Dishonest Attack Ad

Mitt Romney.Tim Dominick/The State/ZUMA Press

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

In a bizarre press release titled “WHAT THEY’RE SAYING: ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT’S TELEVISION AD ‘BELIEVE IN AMERICA,'” Mitt Romney’s staffers pat themselves on the back for the campaign’s latest commercial, claiming the pundits and the press swooned over the clarity and cleverness of their new attack ad:

Senator John McCain: “Good @MittRomney Ad – Reminder Of The President’s Broken Promises.” (Sen. John McCain, Twitter, 11/22/11)

The New York Times: “Moving the campaign into a more combative phase, Mitt Romney is set to show his first television commercial of the campaign on Tuesday in New Hampshire, attacking President Obama over his economic leadership on the same day the president will visit the state to discuss his plans for turning around the economy. … By focusing his message on the president, Mr. Romney is trying to show Republicans that he can take on Mr. Obama aggressively, an attribute that conservatives are seeking in a nominee.” (The New York Times, 11/21/11) …

The Associated Press: “Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is turning President Barack Obama’s own words against him in the Republican hopeful’s TV first ad of his 2012 White House bid. … [Romney] said the commercial would compare Obama’s message as a candidate with Romney’s credentials as a businessman. ‘The contrast between what he said and what he did is so stark, people will recognize we really do need to have someone new lead this country,’ Romney said in an interview with Fox News Channel.” (The Associated Press, 11/21/11) …

GOP Strategist Ed Rogers: “In the Romney campaign, we may be witnessing a truly well-designed and well-executed campaign. … This ad represents more of the same from the Romney campaign. … The ad opens with grainy images of Obama, and it uses Obama’s own words to highlight his administration’s economic failures. … It touches all the right buttons and has all of the right images.” (The Washington Post’s “The Insiders,” 11/22/11)

Back in the real world, the media’s actual response to Romney’s ad wasn’t characterized by praise. To the contrary: descriptions of the deceptive commercial ranged from “misleading” to “entirely a lie,” and PolitiFact gave the TV spot its not-so-coveted “Pants On Fire” grading.

Just to recap, here’s Romney’s “Believe In America” ad that attempts to trap Obama using the president’s “own words against him”:

The offending soundbite—”if we keep talking about the economy we’re going to lose”—was taken from a clip of then-Senator Barack Obama quoting a McCain campaign aide in 2008, not President Obama bemoaning the state of the economy in 2011. So, basically, what the Romney campaign did this week can be summed up accurately in the following clip…

h/t Matt Tomlinson

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate