Seriously? That’s all you have?
On Saturday, Romney campaign spokesman Ryan Williams tweeted this:
View from floor during @BarackObama speech. Not the “overflow” crowd he promised tinyurl.com/7fcozsu #not2008anymore twitter.com/RyanGOP/status…
— Ryan Williams (@RyanGOP) May 5, 2012
The photo was clearly taken before President Obama’s first campaign rally got underway. The empty section you see on either side of the tunnel coming out onto the main floor was directly behind the media stand so nobody was seated there intentionally. You can see this in the panoramic image my wife, Anne C. Savage, took while she was there. Go fullscreen with the pano and zoom in on the section in question and you’ll see that nobody was seated in those seats because all they would have seen was a riser full of video cameras and photographers.
More pictorial proof of the utter lametude of this lie HERE.
Our good friend Bobfr (@Our4thEstate) made a YouTube video using Anne’s pano and has been tweeting it around the internet:
@MittRomney @KarlRove @Reince This video proves your #KOCHSTER #NEWSTAINERS are NO LONGER RELEVANT youtu.be/KS4rjpgATDo
— Bobfr (@Our4thEstate) May 8, 2012
Here’s the video:
In response to William’s tweet, Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse tweeted this (of course):
.@RyanGOP oh please: yfrog.com/obcyrkpj
— Brad Woodhouse (@woodhouseb) May 5, 2012
The yfrog link takes you to a photo of Romney’s embarrassing “rally” at Detroit’s Ford Field where only a handful of rich Michiganders showed up.
Michael Czin, northeast regional press secretary for Obama for America was even more snarky:
Looks like @RyanGOP decided to go to a real rally for a change. Welcome. #forward
— Michael Czin (@MichaelOFA) May 5, 2012
But I’m not writing about this to debunk the Romney photo. Others have done that quite well already like Jason Easley over at PoliticusUSA.
What I’m fascinated by is how lame this is. I understand the slams that go on back and forth during a campaign. That’s normal. Getting worse each election cycle, of course. But normal.
But this? This is lame. This sinks below lame, actually. Did Ryan Williams actually believe that the national news networks weren’t going to show a rowdy crowd of 14,000 cheering on President Obama and his classy, beautiful wife, First Lady Michelle Obama? Did he actually think that people would believe that only a handful of people showed up after the news cycle was completed?
Oh, sure, Breitbart.com and some of the other lunatic fringe anti-Obama sites ate it up like chocolate covered Hate Balls. But they are never going to support President Obama. Hell, they’ll vote for someone they despise like Mitt Romney before they’d support the President.
But the middle-of-the-political road Americans? Those independents and undecideds that both campaigns need to woo? Does Ryan think that blatant, demonstrably false lies are somehow the key to success with that group?
The fact is, Romney’s biggest crowds to date have been around 3,000, about 11,000 less than the crowd in Columbus on Saturday. Mitt Romney would give his wife’s second Cadillac to draw crowds half the size that President Obama draws.
What this whole thing shows isn’t that President Obama is a failure because he isn’t the celebrity rock star at this point in the game as he was in 2008 when Americans were parched to near-death for a tall drink of Hope and Change and Not-George W. Bush. It shows that the Romney campaign has so little to use against him that they are willing to scrape the gum off the bottom of their shoe to throw at him.
And that, kids, is the definition of lame.
