I wanted to post about this before I went to work today, but I ran out of time, so pretend that it is 10 hours ago and this is the first time you are hearing about this.
Unless you just crawled out from the rock you live under, you doubtlessly have heard of the Muslim protests/riots over an anti-Islam film in Egypt and Libya that resulted in an attack on the U.S. consulate compound in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens. If you do live under a stone, or just have been really stoned for the past 24 hours or so, you can catch up on the news here, here, and here.
This post, however, is not about the attack, although it does involve it. No, this post is about opportunism, ghoulishness, and the unmistakable scent of desperation.
Over at the Wonkblog, Erza Klein explains that strange odor in the air:
There’s a saying in politics: No campaign is ever as good as it looks when it’s winning nor as bad as it looks when it’s losing.
When this election cycle started, Mitt Romney’s path to victory was the economy. The crisis Pres. Obama inherited was still lingering. The recovery was progressing slowly, held back by Republican obstructionism that while bad for the nation, could also be seen as politically brilliant. The economic problems in Europe still provide a cloud of uncertainty over the recovery.
Mitt Romney, career businessman, would ride in on his white horse to the rescue. With a six-gun loaded with tax cuts, and deregulation, Mitt would restore America to its rightful place as the shining city on the hill and send the socialist back to Chicago or Kenya.
It’s the economy, stupid. Turn the election into a referendum on the economy and watch Mr. Romney pass 270 and become Pres. Romney. Game, set, and match.
That Romney campaign would have known just what to do on Libya. A simple, restrained statement condemning the murderers and expressing sympathy and solidarity with the victims. A few lines on Romney’s resolve to hunt murderers like these down. Make Romney look presidential, but whatever you do, don’t interrupt the underlying dynamics of the election. This is, by and large, the template that other major Republicans followed in their responses to the attacks.
President Obama, after all, has a wide lead in the polls on who is better at handling foreign policy and terrorism. If the campaign turns to those issues, that might well help Obama. Which gets to the corollary of the Prime Directive: If the election isn’t about the economy, then Obama might win, stupid.
But we are further along in the campaign season now. And an election that many Republicans saw as a tap-in victory when the cycle began, instead first became a coin flip, and then started slipping through their grasp. The Republican convention provided not the 11 point bounce they predicted (hoped for, prayed for, pleaded for, tried to convince themselves they would receive) but rather a 1.9% speed bump. The seemingly unlimited money available to Republicans from Super PAC’s and the like that Citizens United brought into play was not moving the public’s opinion as expected. Romney obtained the image of being out of touch with the common people and has never really been able to shake that perception. (Perhaps because that perception has a lot in common with reality?) His business background, once seen as his greatest strength by many, now haunts him with the ghosts of the pension funds Bain raided, the jobs they sent overseas, and the companies they sent into bankruptcy. The negatives seem to keep piling up: the off-shore bank accounts, his not released tax returns, the multiple stances he seems to take on every single issue, the endless parade of gaffes, including screwing up a slam dunk trip overseas and his failure to mention the war in Afghanistan or the troops currently overseas during his convention speech. His VP choice, a lying liar who lies, looks like a deer in the headlights as he attempts to claim he didn’t do things that not only did he most certainly do, but that are part of the public record. His big convention surprise was an old man yelling at an empty chair. And while Republican hopes for victory always hinged on the economy, the culture warriors of his party keep forcing social issues to the front of the stage.
The writing has been on the wall for a while now. It was there before the Democratic convention. Pres. Clinton’s speech just highlighted it and underlined it a few times.
Mitt Romney is losing.
But the underlying dynamics of of the election are no longer seen as helping Romney. He trails Obama in the polls, and has for basically the entire campaign. He received little-to-no bump from his convention, and then watched Obama enjoy a significant bounce out of his. The economy isn’t proving sufficient to beat Obama. That means the Romney campaign’s strategy isn’t proving sufficient to beat Obama.
This election is far from over. Many things could change, crisis could erupt, disaster could strike. This is a vital election. I caution liberals and progressives to not get over-confident. Don’t plan victory parties. Put all your energy into seeing this election through to the end.
But Romney is losing. Off the record, some Republican strategists will admit this. The blame game has preemptively started. They can see the train wreck coming.
Mitt is backed into a corner. He is about to lose an election that was a shoe-in win for the Republicans after the 2010 election sweep.
And losing campaigns get desperate. They get vicious. They get risky. And Romney just hit the trifecta.
When campaigns are losing, they get desperate. And when they get desperate, they make riskier political decisions. And so, Tuesday night, the Romney campaign made a risky decision. They released this statement:
I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama Administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.
Wednesday morning, given a chance to walk it all back as the full details of the attack revealed themselves, the Romney campaign doubled down on that statement, making clear that it was not a mistake.
The Romney campaign isn’t run by amateurs. They knew this statement was incendiary. And, presumably, they knew it was wrong. It conflates a statement from a staffer in the Egyptian Embassy, who was trying to calm a potential mob, with the Obama administration. It conflates unrest in Egypt with the murder of American diplomat, among others, in Libya. And it accuses the Obama administration of something that they not only didn’t do, but that would have been horrific of them to do: To sympathize with terrorists who had just murdered one of their ambassadors.
Wonder how that went over?
The backlash has been brutal. The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg called Romney’s statement a “slander.” Time’s Mark Halperin tweeted that it was the “most craven+ill-advised move of ’12.” Josh Marshall wrote that it was “reminiscent of John McCain’s rash call four years ago to cancel the presidential debates and the campaign itself to deal with the unfolding economic crisis.”
Even Republicans are face palming over this one. From the Washington Post:
“He bobbled it,” Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers told the Post of the news conference. “It’s important that he present himself as serious, poised and credible during this time, and I thought his statement this morning was unpolished, a little too off-the-cuff for the occasion, and the contrast he set with Obama was not good.”
………
Mark Salter, a longtime aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), called the “rush to condemn” Obama, by Romney and other Republicans, “as tortured in its reasoning as it is unseemly in its timing.”
The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan said on Fox News Wednesday morning that Romney “has not been doing himself any favors. … I always think discretion is the better way to go.”
Anonymously, Republican critics were more blunt.
“They were just trying to score a cheap news cycle hit,” a “very senior Republican foreign policy hand” said to BuzzFeed. “Not ready for primetime,” said a nameless former aide to John McCain in the same piece.
And “several Republican aides and Romney advisers” told Politico that “Romney may have ended up further out on a limb than his team originally intended.”
Out on a limb? Perhaps. Set up on a tee for the President? Definitely. Also from the Washington Post:
“There’s a broader lesson to be learned here,” Obama told “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft. “And I think — you know, Governor Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later. And as president, one of the things I’ve learned is you can’t do that. That, you know, it’s important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts. And that you’ve thought through the ramifications before you make ‘em.” He said it “appears that Gov. Romney didn’t have his facts right.” He added that “most Republicans … reacted responsibly, waiting to find out the facts.”
Let’s return to Erza Klein to close this out:
Romney’s comments were, to be sure, unusually noxious and indecent. But this is also what happens when campaigns get desperate. Like a gambler who’s already lost too much, they begin taking risks in the hope of making it all back. And then, more often than not, they pay the price.
Foster Disbelief 