Campaign Notes

Joe Biden made the following comment, speaking to an audience more than half black in Danville, VA:

Look at what they [Republicans] value, and look at their budget. And look what they're proposing. [Romney] said in the first 100 days, he's going to let the big banks write their own rules -- unchain Wall Street. They're gonna put y'all back in chains.

Both Obama and Biden were subsequently asked about these racially charged remarks and defended them as perfectly appropriate.  (Are there any campaign tactics that are not appropriate with these people?  Murder accusations against Romney are also Obama-approved.)

Mitt Romney has been hitting his stride lately on the campaign trail, fighting back against Obama's barrage of negativity.  Here's part of what he said at a recent campaign event in Ohio (partly in response to Biden's above quote):

In 2008, Candidate Obama said, "if you don't have any fresh ideas, then you use stale tactics to scare voters." He said, "if you don't have a record to run on, then you paint your opponent as someone people should run from." And that, he told us, is how, "You make a big election about small things." 

That was Candidate Obama describing the strategy that is the now the heart of his campaign. 

His campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the Presidency. Another outrageous charge came a few hours ago in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower. 

This is what an angry and desperate Presidency looks like. 

President Obama knows better, promised better and America deserves better. 

Over the last four years, this President has pushed Republicans and Democrats as far apart as they can go. And now he and his allies are pushing us all even further apart by dividing us into groups. He demonizes some. He panders to others. His campaign strategy is to smash America apart and then cobble together 51 percent of the pieces.  

If an American president wins that way, we all lose.

I think Romney is exactly correct.  Obama's re-election strategy all along has been to distract attention from the big issues, destroy his opponents with a barrage of negativity, and divide the American people by pandering to specific racial and gender groups (war on women, amnesty for illegal immigrants, gay marriage, etc.).  Romney needs to stay on the attack the rest of the campaign.

Of course, the media continues to stand as the biggest obstacle to a Romney victory.  Shannen Coffin of National Review's The Corner blog points out the biased way in which The Washington Post has covered this back-and-forth between the candidates.  There has been little coverage of the Obama team's outrageous claims, but when Romney finally fights back with far less outrageous responses The Post makes a front page news story about how Romney is "lashing out" with some of the "harshest rhetoric of his campaign." 

Meanwhile, many in the media have been doing their best to confuse the American public about Paul Ryan and the Medicare debate as well.  As an example, Patrick Brennan of National Review points out the dishonesty of CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien in regurgitating false Democratic talking points about Paul Ryan's plan and ObamaCare under the guise of objective fact-checking.  It is worth reading Brennan's articles here and here to inform yourself of the kind of subtle bias that we are facing from the media in this campaign season.

Finally, on a somewhat unrelated note, there was a shooting at the Family Research Council's headquarters in Washington, DC yesterday.  The shooter was a volunteer for The DC Center for the LGBT Community and shouted out something about FRC's values of hate before wounding a security guard.  I think this shooting is significant.  Much of the media has been echoing the vicious claims of the gay rights community that Christian groups like the Family Research Council are "hate groups" and homophobic bigots because of their opposition to gay marriage and support for the traditional family.  Left-wing groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center even produced a specific listing of "hate groups" that includes the Family Research Council.  So what a surprise.  The media makes them a huge target, and now a mentally unstable individual steeped in this rhetoric goes out and shoots somebody.  Even worse are the multitudes of Twitter responses (well documented by twitchy.com here) that condemn the shooting while suggesting that FRC had it coming to them and even suggesting a moral equivalency between the hatred of the shooter and the "hateful" beliefs of FRC.  Unbelievable.  I am not one to blame an entire group of people based on the unhinged actions of a single individual, but I think the way the media has tried to tar anyone who believes marriage is between a man and a woman as a hateful bigot is shameful and this shooting may well be a consequence of that.

UPDATE: I assumed that the media would largely ignore the FRC story, but I have actually been surprised how much coverage it seems to have gotten, from the front page of The Washington Post to MSM radio.