These are dicey doings, particularly on the part of a candidate already under fire for his campaign-trail slickness and expediency. It erodes the high ground Romney might otherwise claim now that he finds himself under assault from distortive TV and web attack ads from the Democratic National Committee, which follow an all-out web ad mugging from a super PAC called Priorities USA Action. Certainly he’d be much better positioned to protest if he weren’t trafficking in the same sort of tactics.
Those, of course, are tactics he decries when his GOP rivals use them on him. When Texas Governor Rick Perry charged that Romney had edited his book to excise a sentence that could be read as endorsing RomneyCare as a national approach, Romney protested that Perry was twisting his intent.
“Words have meaning,’’ he said. If they’re his words, that is.
About a month later, when Perry accused him of “hiring illegals’’ because a landscaping company had employed several on his property, Romney quickly shifted from disdain to high dudgeon. “Are you just going to keep talking,’’ he barked as his rival pressed the attack, “or are you going to let me finish what I have to say?’’
But Romney’s new ad underlines how self-serving his indignation over distortions really is. After all, he’s practicing the very thing he’s preached against.
Indeed, at least as far as Obama is concerned, this is part of a pattern. Romney, like other Republican candidates, has repeatedly accused Obama of apologizing for America while traveling abroad.
A long Washington Post fact-check in February awarded that GOP charge “four Pinocchios,’’ making it a “whopper’’ of a distortion. But Romney has since upped the ante, saying in June that Obama had “traveled around the globe to apologize for America’’ and alleging in a September debate that the president “went around the world and apologized for America.’’
