Justin's Political Corner
American Bridge, the Democratic super PAC, is targeting Mitt Romney online with one of the harshest “war on women”-themed spots of the cycle. The 30 second web ad is running as pre-roll on ABC News videos starting Tuesday, amping up the Democratic messaging about women in the final week of the campaign.
The American Bridge spot ties Romney to Rep. Todd Akin’s (R-MO) “legitimate rape” comment (used to justify opposition to abortion rights in the case of rape), Rep. Joe Walsh’s (R-IL) contention that a woman’s life cannot be at risk due pregnancy (used to justify opposition to health exemptions for a total ban on abortion rights) and Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock’s line about rape, conception and God’s will. Viewers are directed to Bridge’s BindersFullOfWomen.com microsite, which includes more videos on GOP positions on rape and abortion.
ORLANDO, Florida—President Barack Obama’s re-election team waged all-out political war on Monday against a controversial ad by Republican rival Mitt Romney. The ad implies, falsely, that Jeep plans to move jobs to China from Ohio—a charge that could resonate in that pivotal battleground state.
The Obama campaign released a commercial rebutting the allegation, while Vice President Joe Biden and former president Bill Clinton denounced the former Massachusetts governor’s commercial as, basically, a lie.
“Now it turns out that Jeep is reopening in China because they made so much money here they can afford to do it,” Clinton said at a Youngstown, Ohio, rally. “They put out a statement today saying that it was the biggest load of bull in the world that they would consider shutting down their American operation.”
Romney’s campaign ran the ad over the weekend in Ohio, where one in eight jobs is linked to the auto industry—and Obama has used his rescue of big car markers to gain a political edge over his rival. Recent polls have shown that the president has a narrow edge in the Buckeye State. Defeat there would sharply narrow Romney’s path to the White House.
“Obama took GM and Chrysler into bankruptcy and sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China,” said the voice-over on the Romney campaign ad. “Mitt Romney will fight for every American job.”
The ad appears to be inspired by a Bloomberg news report that Fiat, which owns Chrysler, planned to boost its manufacturing operations in China. Chrysler issued a rare public comment that acidly remarked of the ad: “A careful and unbiased reading of the Bloomberg take would have saved unnecessary fantasies and extravagant comments.”
(The Romney campaign ad does not explicitly say that the company will shift production from Ohio to China. But Romney himself said at a rally in Defiance, Ohio, last week that he had “seen a story” that “one of the great manufacturers in this state, Jeep, now owned by Italians, is thinking of moving all production to China.”)
“I’ve served with eight presidents. I have never seen this in my public life,” Biden declared at the same rally. “He’s running an ad in this state saying that President Obama made the companies go bankrupt… gave the industry the Italians, who are selling it to the Chinese.
“It’s an absolutely patently false assertion,” Biden continued. ”It’s such an outrageous assertion that one of the few times in my memory a major American corporation, Chrysler, has felt obliged to go public and say, there is no truth.”
h/t: Yahoo! News
WASHINGTON — The Obama-supporting super PAC Priorities USA Action is going back to Bain in a campaign-closing television ad campaign that attacks GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney for his time in private equity.
The group, which just reported raising $15.2 million in September, is re-releasing its most effective ad from the summer in key swing states. The spot features an employee at a Bain-controlled company discussing how he had to build a stage for a company announcement, only to find out that the announcement was that workers had been fired.
Titled “Stage,” the ad proved remarkably provocative in Ohio in particular, where scars from years of jobs being shipped overseas still linger. According to a Priorities USA memo, announcing the campaign, it will be one of several spots focusing on Romney’s private equity record.
“New ads to be released in coming days featuring stories of people who represent the thousands of middle class workers who lost their jobs, their pensions and their health benefits after Romney and his firm broke promises and bankrupted companies,” the memo reads.
It’s worth remembering that, for a brief period of time, some Democrats (mainly those with ties to Wall Street) questioned the notion of using Romney’s private equity career against him, but the attacks proved effective over the course of the summer. And to the extent that Romney’s been able to improve his standing in the polls it seems largely because he’s managed to dispel the image (pushed by Priorities USA) that he’s an out-of-touch plutocrat.
h/t: Huffington Post
The Obama campaign is capitalizing on Mitt Romney’s promise to cut funding to PBS and Sesame Street’s Big Bird with a new ad mocking Romney’s dedication to stripping this funding. During the last Wednesday’s debate, Romney mentioned cutting funding to PBS even though he likes Big Bird in order to cut the deficit.
“Bernie Madoff, Ken Lay, Dennis Kozlowski, criminals, gluttons of greed,” the narrator says. “And the evil genius who towered over them? One man has the guts to speak his name.”
The ad then cuts to footage of Mitt Romney saying three separate times, “Big Bird.”
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s Independent Expenditure released its fourth TV ad exposing Jason Plummer for pledging to protect tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas and ensure that he and other millionaires get more tax breaks as well. The DCCC’s TV ad, “Never” asks voters to consider, Jason Plummer has never had to work for anything, so why would he work for Illinois middle class families.
Democratic candidate Patrick Murphy struck back on Tuesday at Rep. Allen West (R-FL), after West ran an ad about Murphy’s arrest in 2003 bar-fight. In response, Murphy went after a key event for West in 2003 — when his military career was ended.
In a race that has possibly featured the most intensely negative ads of the cycle, this one is a doozy.
“You need the facts about Allen West in 2003,” the announcer says, in response to how West’s ad touted his own military service in that year. “West was criminally charged with violating the Uniform Code of Military Justice; found guilty of three counts of aggravated assault; and relieved of his command. The final Army report: West ‘performed illegal acts…merited court martial…faced 11 years in prison.’ Allen West: He just isn’t who he says he is.”
West fired a handgun next to the head of an Iraqi policeman during an interrogation, and after first having the officer beaten. West said this was done in order to stop an impending attack on his unit, but no evidence of such a plan was found based on the policeman’s coerced confession.
The incident did, however, help West gain notoriety with conservative activists, and to launch a political career that ultimately saw him elected to Congress in the 2010 Republican landslide.
h/t: Eric Kleefeld at TPM
The gloves are off in the race for the 12th Congressional District.
The campaign of Democratic candidate Bill Enyart, a Belleville attorney, on Wednesday released audio of a radio commercial that the campaign said is being unleashed.
Jason Bresler, Enyart’s spokesman, said the ad has not yet aired but it will air on radio stations throughout the 12th District.
The Enyart commercial criticizes Republican opponent Jason Plummer’s decision not to release his tax returns.
The spot opens with ominous-sounding music, and a narrator asking, “What’s Jason Plummer hiding? He’s running for Congress, but he refuses to make any of his tax returns public.”
The spot uses the word “millionaire” three times and the word “billionaire” once. It accuses Republicans of “extending tax cuts to millionaires like Jason Plummer.”
H/T: bnd.com
Is Todd Akin Mainstream? (Social Security, Minimum Wage, and Student Loans) (by ClaireMcCaskill2012)
A birther organization known as the Conservative Majority Fund is currently running a national ad campaign claiming that it can disqualify President Obama from running for reelection. While the ad is steeped in the rhetoric of the birther movement, it goes far beyond simply claiming that Obama was not born in the United States. Indeed, the ad manages to cram a truly stunning number of far right conspiracy theories into just one minute of air time:
Who is Barack Obama? We know less about this man than any other President in American history. What’s he hiding? His autobiography is full of fictional characters. But there’s a lot more than that. If you try to look into his past, you run into a brick wall.
His college records at Columbia, sealed! His college records at Harvard, sealed! We don’t know what his thesis papers were about because those are sealed too. He Selective Service record is sealed. His records as an attorney are sealed. He has a Connecticut Social Security number and we can’t get answers about that either.
And no one — I mean no one — has seen an actual physical copy of Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The fact is, if we don’t know who Barack Obama is, we shouldn’t even have him as a candidate for president. Let’s disqualify Obama before the Democratic National Convention. Call today to sign the demand to disqualify Obama… .We need 10,000 signatures from every congressional district to boot this guy off the ballot and have the Democrats nominate someone else.
Watch it:
The ad identifies no actual legal basis for its claim that a sitting president can be forced to give up his reelection bid if enough of his political opponents sign a petition.
As the ad’s announcer reads his script, a chryon runs at the bottom asking questions such as “What is [Obama’s] connection to Bill Ayers?” “What is his current relationship with Rev. Wright?” and “Who paid for his Harvard Education?”
Racism and/or xenophobia in play with this ad? You betcha!
DNC Video Welcomes Romney Home By Replaying Gaffes Of Overseas Trip | TPM Livewire
A new DNC video welcoming Mitt Romney back to the United States after his trip abroad provides a summary of unfavorable coverage that Romney garnered overseas. The video is straightforward and relies entirely on news clips that chronicle the most frustrating parts of his trip, from his Olympics gaffe in London to his remarks about culture in Israel to his press secretary’s unsavory comments in Poland.
Peter Kinder’s Suite Life (by DemocraticGovernors)
Peter Kinder is bad for Missouri, as is Brad Lager. Vote Democratic!
