One of the most surprising — and to many of us who are political junkies and/or who worked or work in the news media shocking — features of the 2012 campaign has been the extent to which not only doesn’t accuracy not matter any more in politics but the way Mitt Romney’s campaign gives a half a peace sign to fact-checking. This isn’t just the usual fudging of facts, or the kind of rascally behavior that elicits those smug, amused looks from the political pros on the Sunday shows. This is something deeper.
You’ve almost wondered when the Romney campaign could cross a line and if any line exists.
It turns out it may have and a line does seemingly exist. It was over an ad that made a patently false, not true and I never use the word but I will: lying…assertion, about Jeep exporting jobs to China. DETAILS HERE including a video of the ad.
This isn’t a small matter for Americans of both parties or no party. A kid can’t be raised properly without know about boundaries and consequences and for the sake of future American campaigns there have to be some boundaries and consequences in an issue such as this.
The danger for Team Romney is if the story becomes about how his ad is patently false it then is unveiled in the context of boilerplate background about what Romney did on the auto bailout and the (in)famous Op-Ed that he wrote. It puts his past assertions right back on the campaign plate.
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.