Chris Wallace, "FOX News Sunday" host: Didn't this White House badly misjudge this recovery? I remember in 2010, two summers ago, you and Vice President Biden were running around talking about 'Recovery Summer.' That was the summer of 2010 and the fact is the White House said if you got the stimulus, the $800 billion that unemployment would stay under 8%. In fact, with the stimulus, unemployment has stayed over 8% for the last 42 months. That's three and a half years.

David Axelrod: Chris, first of all, I wasn't running around saying anything other than that we were going to have to be persistent. That it took years to get in this mess, it was going to take years to get out --

Wallace: You talking about 'Recovery Summer' in 2010, sir.

Axelrod: Well you should show me the tape of me saying that. I've been very consistent about the fact that we need to be very persistent in our efforts here.

"This summer will be the most active Recovery Act season yet," David Axelrod was quoted saying in 6/17/2010 Politico article.

freeman2 wrote:Yawn...Has Obama won yet?

danivon wrote:It's not like it's a massive lie. It's not exactly Watergate is it? He denied promoting a message promising something that didn't happen. Big whoop. It was also two years ago, and was kind of already 'priced in' to the mid-terms.

If you are gonna start a new thread every time one of these little spats happens, it's going to be a very long three months...

Doctor Fate wrote:Axlerod said he never promoted "recovery summer." Um, yes he did. Two years ago.

You're right--I'll need about a thousand forums for the Obama campaigns dirty tricks.

Obama, who first sprang to national attention with an appeal to civility, has made these kind of attacks central to his strategy. The argument, by implication from Obama and directly from his surrogates, is not merely that Romney is the wrong choice for president but that there is something fundamentally wrong with him.
To make the case, Obama and his aides have used an arsenal of techniques — personal ridicule, suggestions of ethical misdeeds and aspersions against Romney’s patriotism — that many voters and commentators claim to abhor, even as the tactics have regularly proved effective.
The unequal distribution of personal putdowns — Obama and his team indulging in them far more frequently than Romney — has been largely obscured by two factors.

One is the general negativity of the campaign, buffeted by charge and countercharge on an hourly basis, in which both sides have participated with abandon.
The other is the fact that Obama, over four years, has been subjected to so many personal assaults from the right, on issues such as whether he is lying about his place of birth or the content of his college transcripts. Lost in the smoke is the fact that few of the personal assaults — as opposed to political or policy criticisms — have come from Romney or his official representatives. The Romney campaign has leveled charges — on welfare reform, for instance — that take liberties with the truth, but few attacks on Obama as a person.
The imbalance is notable in the context of recent history. For more than a generation — since Michael Dukakis got savaged in 1988 and Bill Clinton decried the “politics of personal destruction” in the 1990s — it has been woven into the self-image of many Democrats that they are victims rather than victimizers when it comes to personal attacks.
Some Democrats in 2012 say this is exactly the point, and that Obama therefore is within his rights to try to turn Romney into a figure of ridicule or even contempt in the way that George W. Bush and his campaign succeeded in doing to John Kerry in 2004. . .

It is not that the Obama-led attacks on Romney’s character have been especially vicious by historical standards. But they have been both relentless and remorseless, designed to portray Romney as too flawed personally to be a viable political alternative :

— Obama senior adviser David Axelrod early in the campaign called Romney “a charlatan.” Senior White House adviser David Plouffe made the same hollow-man argument during the GOP primaries: “You get the sense with Mitt Romney that if he thought it was good to say the sky was green and the grass was blue to win an election, he’d say it.”
— Obama’s campaign has suggested Romney is deceitful or corrupt. Deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, highlighting inconsistencies in Romney’s explanation of his departure from Bain Capital, suggested that Romney is “misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony.” The alternative, she said, is Romney was lying to the American people. Last weekend, Cutter said that Romney and Paul Ryan think “lying is a virtue,” judging from the factual misrepresentations of the GOP convention.
— Obama’s campaign and surrogates say Romney’s business decisions and his personal finances call his patriotism into question.
Speaking Tuesday night at the convention here, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland said “Mitt Romney has so little economic patriotism that even his money needs a passport. It summers on the beaches of the Cayman Islands and winters on the slopes of the Swiss Alps.”
A little later, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley pummeled Romney over his offshore funds: “Swiss bank accounts never built an American bridge. Swiss bank accounts don’t put cops on the beat or teachers in our classrooms.”
An Obama campaign ad criticizing Romney’s tenure as a “corporate CEO” who outsourced jobs concluded with the observation, “It’s just what you expect from a guy who had a Swiss bank account.”
And then there was the infamous ad from the pro-Obama group Priorities USA Action, featuring a laid-off steelworker, Joe Soptic, recounting how he lost his job and health insurance when Bain closed a factory. Years later, Soptic’s wife died and the man pins Romney with some responsibility: “I do not think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to anyone. And furthermore, I do not think Mitt Romney is concerned.”
— Obama and his aides have portrayed Romney as a figure of ridicule, a kind of modern-day Thurston Howell III. The president mocked Romney’s use of the word “marvelous,” saying, “It’s a word you don’t often hear.” In Iowa last month, he made jeering references at three stops in a row to a story from the early ’80s about how Romney’s dog, Seamus, was put in a crate atop the car on Romney family vacations.

He'll only win if there are enough people who care as little about the country as you seem to

Fate
He'll only win if there are enough people who care as little about the country as you seem to.

rickyp wrote:bbauska and Ray, I perhaps should apologize for missing the quotation marks. As I was quoting Fate when he said to Freeman 2

Fate
He'll only win if there are enough people who care as little about the country as you seem to.

So I have to ask you Ray, why you jumped to Fates defence and not Freeman?

rickyp wrote:bbauska and Ray, I perhaps should apologize for missing the quotation marks. As I was quoting Fate when he said to Freeman 2

Fate
He'll only win if there are enough people who care as little about the country as you seem to.

So I have to ask you Ray, why you jumped to Fates defence and not Freeman?

.