It’s so much worse than we thought it would be
Mitt Romney’s campaign is in death watch mode at the moment. Despite spending insane amounts of money on campaign ads in swing states, he now faces a 7-point gap in the Gallup daily tracking poll:
Additionally, Nate Silver gives him only a 20.3% chance of winning the election.
And then yesterday happened. That is when Mitt Romney completely lost his mind and the race. That is when the “Romney Death Stench” hit the noses of the entire country. He literally accused President Obama of being responsible for the death of the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three others during an attack on the embassy in Benghazi.
It all started when Romney released a statement at 10 pm last night, embargoed until midnight so that it wouldn’t be released on September 11th. In it, he said:
I’m outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It’s disgraceful that the Obama administration’s first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks.
Romney was referring to a statement released by the U.S. Embassy in Egypt that came hours before the attack in Libya that resulted in tragedy. It was not a statement from President Obama and the death of Stevens had not yet occurred. In other words, it was a brazenly political attack in the middle of an unfolding and tragic event that took the lives of four Americans serving their country overseas.
Reince Priebus, the chair of the Republican Party tweeted this:
Obama sympathizes with attackers in Egypt. Sad and pathetic.
— Reince Priebus (@Reince) September 12, 2012
In talking points issued by the Romney campaign, they said this:
We have seen a foreign policy of weakness and decline in American influence and respect. Yesterday, we saw the consequences of this perceived weakness.
In other words: It’s President Obama’s fault that four Americans, including an ambassador, were killed.
The media has crashed down on Romney with the full force of its voice.
The Washington Post:
Mr. Romney…would do well to consider the example of Republican former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, who issued a statement Wednesday lamenting “the tragic loss of life at our consulate,” praising Mr. Stevens as “a wonderful officer and a terrific diplomat” and offering “thoughts and prayers” to “all the loved ones of the fallen.” That was the appropriate response.
Mark Halperin of Time magazine:
Unless the Romney campaign has gamed this crisis out in some manner completely invisible to the Gang of 500, his doubling down on criticism of the President for the statement coming out of Cairo is likely to be seen as one of the most craven and ill-advised tactical moves in this entire campaign.
Mitt Romney’s sharply-worded attack on President Obama over a pair of deadly riots in Muslim countries last night has backfired badly among foreign policy hands of both parties, who cast it as hasty and off-key, released before the facts were clear at what has become a moment of tragedy.
MSNBC’s David Gregory:
Romney appears to have launched a political attack even before facts of embassy violence were known. Then uses day to issue vague FP vision
— David Gregory (@davidgregory) September 12, 2012
Over the top: Yesterday we noted that Mitt Romney, down in the polls after the convention, was throwing the kitchen sink at President Obama. Little did we know the kitchen sink would include — on the anniversary of Sept. 11 — one of the most over-the-top and (it turns out) incorrect attacks of the general election campaign.
There’s plenty more.
Republicans are leaving Romney out to flounder on his own. All of the major Republican players have gone out of their way to NOT endorse Romney’s rookie act, leaving only Rush Limbaugh to say that Romney looked “presidential”:
Mitt Romney, who is the only guy that looked presidential in all of this, who had the guts to go out and characterize this statement from the embassy accurately.
Here’s a former aide to Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign:
Just on a factual level that the statement was not a response but preceding, or one could make the case precipitating. And just calling it a ‘disgrace’ doesn’t really cut it. Not ready for prime time.
Republicans are using terms like “incompetent”, “just trying to score a cheap news cycle” “utter disaster” his “Lehman moment” “not ready for prime time” “not presidential.” And on and on.
There’s more examples HERE.
President Obama had a few things to say on the matter in an interview with 60 Minutes:
I think most Americans, Democrats or Republicans, understand that there are times when we set politics aside, and one of those is when we’ve got a direct threat to American personnel who are overseas. {…}And so I think that if you look at how most Republicans have reacted, most elected officials, they’ve reacted responsibly, waiting to find out the facts before they talk, making sure that our No. 1 priority is the safety and security of American personnel. {…}
It appears that Gov. Romney didn’t have his facts right. The situation in Cairo was one in which an embassy that is being threatened by major protests releases a press release saying that the film that had disturbed so many Muslims around the world wasn’t representative of what Americans believe abut Islam. {…}
There’s a broader lesson to be learned here: Gov. Romney seems to have a tendency to shoot first and aim later and as president one of the things I’ve learned is you can’t do that. It’s important for you to make sure that the statements that you make are backed up by the facts and that you’ve thought through the ramifications before you make them. {…}
In an effort to cool the situation down, it didn’t come from me, it didn’t come form Secretary Clinton, it came from people on the ground who are potentially in danger. And my tendency is to cut folks a little bit of slack when they’re in that circumstance, rather than try to question their judgment from the comfort of a campaign office.
If you were going to mark a single moment in time when Mitt Romney lost the race to become president and proved to the whole world, including American voters, that he is completely out of his league and not fit to be the President of the United States, yesterday was it. Mitt Romney and Reince Priebus showed themselves to be the complete amateur rookies that they are. They have no business being in charge of anything, much less the most powerful country in the world.
That doesn’t mean we let our guard down or that we stop campaigning and getting out the vote for President Obama. On the contrary, it is more important than we could have ever known to get out and reelect the president. The consequences of not doing so are crystal clear now. Mitt Romney has proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is unfit to be President. We need to turn out voters in massive numbers to vote for Barack Obama and to take back control of the House as well as all of the various state governments.
The alternative is too frightening to comprehend.
