BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON
A United States Senator who enjoys wide respect for his legislative skill and political insight predicted privately the other day that the 2012 Presidential campaign may become one of the most negative and brutal in our nation’s history, rivaling the 1800 Adams-Jefferson campaign.
His prediction was ever so prescient because the very next day a spokeswoman for President Obama accused Mitt Romney of being either a liar or a felon.
The American people need to put a stop to this nonsense before it gets any worse. The Republican mudslinging in the primary was disgusting, and now it is a cancer in the general election campaign.
Americans can’t afford it. We are facing a fiscal crisis whose damage may be worse than that of some wars. The government is on the brink of fiscal collapse and people in government are actually threatening to send us into default on our debts if they don’t get what they want. The decisions facing us in the next six months are so profound, they will have such an impact on the pocketbooks of millions of Americans, we can’t afford to let the political system sink any further into this cesspool of character assassinations, lies, distortions and charges and counter charges.
When destructive political behavior is so pervasive, at it is now, you just don’t wipe the slate clean the day after the election, say all is forgiven and get down to the business of governing. It doesn’t work that way and you need look no further back in history than 2010. We never recovered from the anger and hostility engendered in the 2010 campaign. It produced a wasteland of governmental gridlock that left the American people with nothing but two years of heartache, disillusionment and lost opportunities.
The mudslinging we are witnessing in 2012 is worse than 2010, and when it comes to governing, we’re out of time. We don’t have another two years to waste.
This latest ride down the mudslide is over something as innocuous as a legal document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that identifies Romney as the CEO, President, and owner of Bain Capital a year or so after he left the company to run the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 1999. Follow this now. The Obama campaign says that if Romney was managing the company after 1999, then he was involved in investments Bain made in companies that outsourced American jobs. It follows then that Obama can criticize Romney for destroying jobs in the U.S. rather than creating them.
That’s important to President Obama, not to us, because he has made outsourcing one of the cornerstones of his summer campaign. It is a tactic he is counting on to draw public attention away from the plight of some 26 million Americans who are still unemployed or underemployed, the slow pace of the economic recovery and the real possibility we could slip back into recession in the Europeans don’t get their house in order. He is also using it to counter the Romney campaign message that Romney knows more about creating jobs than Obama and he–Romney–can get the country producing again.
If the election is decided on the President’s economic record, he loses and he knows it.
There are huge ethical problems with the Obama campaign’s mudslinging gambit.
The first is that there is little or no evidence to back up Obama’s charges about Romney and Bain, which means he is deliberately accusing Romney of what amounts to criminality, knowing the accusation is unfounded.
Two of the individuals who may well be more important in this election cycle than some of the candidates, FactCheck.org’s Brooks Jackson, and the Washington Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler have, unlike many of their brethren, behaved like professional journalists and researched the charges. They’ve concluded, independently, that there is no credible evidence Romney was still active in Bain after 1999.
Kessler reported again in the Sunday paper that he went through the SEC papers months ago and talked with SEC experts who explained why Romney’s name and signature still showed up on SEC documents after he left Bain. Jackson’s organization reviewed the new clams of liberal blogs and the Boston Globe, and came to the same conclusion. They found the (Obama) campaign’s evidence “weak or non-existent”. End of story? Nope.
Instead of seriously vetting the Obama charges and moving on to other political nonsense, the media joined the campaign as enthusiastic accomplices. The story dominated the news for days. The July 15 Sunday talk shows were awash with it. There was only rare mention of the fact-check findings, of course, because those findings would have essentially negated the controversial nature of the charges. There’s nothing worse that pulling the raw, red meat off the table in the middle of a media feeding frenzy.
The Sunday anchors, from NBC’s David Gregory to CNN’s Candy Crowley, who is usually well centered, could hardly contain themselves. As late as Sunday night, ABC’s David Muir was still quoting from the SEC papers without so much as a mention of Kessler’s findings or statements by SEC experts who had offered logical explanations for the discrepancy. Muir also blended the Bain Capital story with another of the Obama campaign’s summer tactics, pressing Mitt Romney to disclose more income tax returns. It was all pro-Obama, all the time, bias so blatant you just couldn’t write it off as anything else but deliberate. Sad. Charlie Gibson once sat in that chair.
President Obama has succeeded with this gambit, probably beyond his wildest dreams. The economy is off the screen, and so is the national debt. Romney is on the defensive, the sensational headlines are screaming at him, and the cable land talking heads whose job it is to confuse us about the issues so they can whip us into an emotional frenzy, are having a field day, or week. The President has done again what he has done for years, create the political perception that our society and our economy is divided between innocent victims and evil villains. The next phase, already begun, is taxing the rich. That should take us well into mid-August.
There isn’t even any reasoned discussion in the media about outsourcing, a complex economic activity, that may not have created anywhere near the job loss the President is claiming. Noted economist Robert Samuelson wrote in the Post on July 10: “Lost in all this back-and-forth was perspective on how much offshoring reduced U.S. job growth. The answer: probably not much.”
Here’s the thing: This may be great political theater to some in the media, and great entertainment to those who think American politics is reality TV, but the price we are all paying for it is very high.
Our political process is being driven farther into the gutter, the voters are being denied the basic information and knowledge they need to make intelligent decisions in November, the partisans are being further polarized, and we are being torn apart by the exaggeration and exploitation of our social, racial, economic and even religious distinctions. And, to put a fine point on it all, while the circus performs drags on, little or nothing is getting done to make our country a better place.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.