If you ever had doubts about how bankrupt politics is from truth this will erase it:
There has always been friction between Mitt Romney and certain Republican governors over how best to frame the state of the economy. While the presumptive GOP nominee has argued during his campaign that the recovery is far too slow, the electoral implications for making that case in states that include Virginia, Ohio and Michigan are much more complicated.
Republican governors Bob McDonnell of Virginia, John Kasich of Ohio and Rick Snyder of Michigan all must show that they are leading their states’ economies in the right direction. Occasionally, that means discussing the economy in rosy terms, putting them at odds with the Romney campaign.
Bloomberg News dug a bit deeper than usual On Wednesday night into how much friction this has caused, reporting that the Romney campaign has asked Florida Gov. Rick Scott to tone “down his statements heralding improvements in the state’s economy because they clash with the presumptive Republican nominee’s message.”
The story is well reported, going so far as to quote a Republican operative as saying that the ads being run by the Florida GOP seemed like they were crafted at President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign headquarters.
Just think about it. They don’t want news about the economy’s improvement in Florida to how it was at its worst to get out because it interferes with the Romney campaign’s narrative that Obama has made the economy worse. Why believe anything the Romney campaign is asserting if they’re trying to block A REPUBLICAN from putting the economy into perspective?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.