From this Sunday's Meet the Press, columnist and perpetual Republican apologist and Village history revisionist David Brooks, really is not happy with all of those terribly mean campaign ads being run against Mitt Romney and his time at Bain Capital by the Obama campaign.
PolitiFact took at look at the campaign ad Brooks is complaining about here and rated the ad "mostly true." And while people like Brooks can quibble about whether the steel industry was having problems already and the fact that the company went bankrupt after Romney left Bain, it doesn't change the fact that Romney's claim that this makes him some sort of "job creator" is utterly false and the fact that Bain loaded the company up with debt at the expense of the workers and the contracts they had in regard to their labor agreements and ultimately their pension funds, or that this is not the only company that Bain did this sort of thing to.
And it doesn't change the fact that if you're working somewhere with a union and a lot of seniority, Romney and his cohorts at Bain were not the people you'd want to see buy your company, since it's pretty obvious with Romney's continued disdain for unions that busting one up was just considered a plus by someone like him.
If David Brooks is so terribly concerned about who is telling the truth out on the campaign trail, maybe he should read all of the installments by Steve Benen on Romney and his multitude of lies which are long enough to make your head spin, the latest of which can be read here: Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XIX.
And if Brooks is also concerned about the campaigns becoming too negative or "personal" maybe he ought to spend a little more time asking Mitt Romney to tell the truth once in a blue moon, or doing more to beat back the lunacy from the birthers, like his buddy Donald Trump, who he's out campaigning with right now. Or maybe Mr. Brooks could ask Mitt Romney to say something about Rush Limbaugh and the pack of lies, bigotry and misogyny that flows out of that man's mouth every day of the week.
No, he's going to complain about a campaign ad being some sort of assault on Mitt Romney when it does tell the truth about what he thinks of the working class when it comes to them being collateral damage in the wake of making a profit off of them for his investors, which is not much.
Brooks remarks below the fold.
GREGORY: I want to start David Brooks on where I ended, with the Governor and the Speaker. You know, look what we have so far. We've had the war on women debate. We've had Hilary Rosen's comments. We've had now this battle over Bain. What is fair game in terms of what people really ought to be focusing on?
BROOKS: I think it’s fair. Especially if you don’t have agenda. We’ve got deep structural problems; I haven’t seen either candidate talk about this. If you ask the American people, does either candidate have a plan, a big plan for the future? Thirty-six percent Obama, 31 percent Romney. That’s pretty bad. And I question the Obama decision to go after it, to start negative. They’ve decided to focus a negative way and this to me seems to me self-destructive.
People are the left of Obama, but they like him personally. They admire him, and now I think he’s at risk of throwing that away by starting negative and going extremely tough and extremely hard, looking conventional, and frankly running ads that are inaccurate. The ad they ran against the steel company that Bain took over had a couple of inaccuracies that were the basis of the ad.
They said the company was successful until Bain took it over; that’s false. They said Romney left, threw people out in the street; Romney was gone by then. They said they were loading up debt on these companies and dumping them. These companies have no higher default rates than anybody else. So I think starting negative not only distracts you from what he should be talking about—the big agenda for structural problems—but also damages his personal reputation.
[...]
GREGORY: Let's look at, a lot of this is of course going to circle back to the state of the campaign. He head off into the summer of campaigning. Let me look at the head to head first which shows as it did frankly in Ohio, he's still under 50 percent. The President has a slight edge, 47 to 43, but if you look at some of the advantaged David Brooks, that the President now has, to me it kind of goes to the point of how he's trying to identify and cast Gov. Romney.
Among Hispanics, younger voters, women, Westerners, independents, all advantaged to the President. Also on that list, seniors, suburban women and overall in the battleground states.
BROOKS: The Democrats have huge demographics advantages which are going to get bigger over the years. The President has big personal advantages. A couple of disadvantages; one Europe. I think Europe is going to end up being the big story if Greece falls out of the Euro and other peripheral countries, a disaster for any incumbent. So that's one of them.
And then I think the tenor of the campaign is going to change. What's going to happen, it's going to become the New Orleans Saints. By that I mean that normal competition is going to turn into bounty hunting. And people in both campaigns are going to get their juices flowing, and they're going to take meaner and meaner shots and that will suppress turnout. And that will likely hurt the President a little more because his personal favorability ratings are so much higher.
Ah yes... because it would just be so much better for President Obama if he let Mitt Romney attack him without responding so all those so-called "independent" voters out there who we're supposed to believe the narrative about, supposedly bought into the idea that he was going to change the way Washington works, and are going to be terribly disappointed to find out he's actually a politician.
I'm not sure who those voters are that Brooks thinks he should be catering to, but I don't think they exist other than in the minds of David Brooks and his ilk. I don't know of anyone who actually believes that President Obama was going to have any luck getting rid of the partisanship in Washington and Republicans have just reinforced the fact that they're going to put party ahead of cooperating on anything with their continued obstruction over the last few years. Anyone who has paid attention to what's gone on during that time knows that, which I expect includes David Brooks, but he'd prefer to ignore the fact that his party is primarily responsible for the gridlock in Washington or the real nastiness we've seen from the extremists in the Republican Party.
And heaven forbid President Obama should go after Republicans and their policies when they have openly stated that their primary goal was to make sure he would not be reelected than ever cooperating on anything from day one since he took office.
I think the Obama campaign should be treating any advice they get from David Brooks about the same way they should be treating any of Karl Rove's advice which I wrote about here.
