CancerGate: Obama Campaign's Cold-Blooded Lies
Election '12: Until lately, the media have kept President Obama's missteps from doing him much damage. But the outrageous lie his campaign has used to blame Mitt Romney for a cancer death is uncontainable.
High likability ratings are one thing the Obama campaign has going for it. Gallup recently found that twice as many registered voters consider Obama "the more likable of the two presidential candidates." His campaign has been exploiting this with "Happy Birthday Barack!" web cards, and ads featuring a supercute Obama family photo.
But the snowballing CancerGate scandal might be a game changer. If Barack is such a nice guy, how can he preside over such groundless, exceedingly personal attacks on his opponent?
It resonated in the third and final presidential debate between Obama and 2008 Republican nominee John McCain when Obama deflected the issue of his relationship with ex-terrorist Bill Ayers with an admonition about "making sure that we disagree without being disagreeable" and characterizing "each other as bad people" because "that has been a culture in Washington that has been taking place for too long."
With CancerGate, Obama and his campaign are indeed saying Romney is evil — then lying about it.
When the brouhaha began this week over the Priorities USA Obama super-PAC ad featuring a laid-off steelworker blaming Romney for his wife's death from cancer, numerous Obama mouthpieces claimed, as one put it, "we don't have any knowledge of the story of the family."
Turns out that the same steelworker had been the star of one of the Obama campaign's own ads, and took part in a conference call the Obama campaign hosted in May, during which he told the same story of his wife's cancer.
It also turns out that Romney was no longer heading up Bain Capital when its client, GST Steel, laid off the worker. And the worker's wife apparently had her own health insurance. So how on earth could Romney be the slightest bit responsible?
On Thursday, Obama campaign spokeswoman Jen Psaki changed her tune. "No one is denying he was in one of our campaign ads," she said of the steelworker the campaign supposedly knew nothing about.
Liars always weave a tangled web for themselves, but when the presidential campaign of a "nice guy" gets caught coordinating personal, cold-hearted lying, escaping from that web won't be easy |
