I was wondering when someone would bring out the Mike Huckabee line from the 2008 campaign, when he was attacked by Romney much the way Romney attacked Newt in this election cycle.
Romney always starts it. He did it in Iowa in December 2007 against Huckabee and McCain, and in Iowa 2011 against Newt; now he’s going after Rick Santorum as well. And when the recipient of his negativity hits back, all of the sudden the media narrative is that the opponent is going negative.
This ad by Newt (not his SuperPAC) should be run all day and night long on television in South Carolina, but it appears that it’s only a web ad. So pass it along to everyone you know in South Carolina.
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It’s kind of like the way it is in football – one guy whacks another while the ref’s looking the other way, the victim whacks back but catches the penalty flag from the now attentive ref.
Is the lesson to never retaliate or to hit first?
No easy answer to that one, HankHawk. In politics, it’s not how you play the game; it’s whether you win or lose.
I say whack the ref.
In politics, the closet things to the refs are the voters and the media. The voters have a limited opportunity to penalize candidates, while the media has a dog in the fight in getting their boy Obama reelected.
If McCain hadn’t endorsed Romney already, the Gingrich campaign would have tried to get his go-ahead, as well as Huckabee’s permission, to run an edit of that ad through South Carolina and Florida.
It appears that Romney did learn something from the Ted Kennedy campaign after all.
1. Romney is using classic Bush family tactics: while the candidate walks around looking statesmanlike, Lee Atwater/Karl Rove does the dirty work in the shadows.
2. Dirty tactics worked in SC against McCain in 2000. They did not work against Nikki Haley in 2010. Maybe SC voters are getting fed up with how their political establishment operates.
3. Gingrich is surging on Intrade. As of this writing, he has a 40% implied chance of winning, up from 10% a few days ago.
Good. Though Intrade is little more than a glorified lagging indicator of prevailing conventional wisdom. 🙂
I think you better look at Intrade again.
Romney – 84%
Gingrich – 8.4%
How do you increase 10% and stay lower than 10%?
“He uses statistics like a drunk uses a lamp post – more for support than illumination.”
I’m beginning to think that SuperPACs should be eliminated. If candidate abc wants to bash candidate xyz they should have to “own” it. Why give them an out and let they blame it on the PAC that they supposedly had no control over?
Well, if Mittens gets the nomination, perhaps this is an indication that he won’t be shy about using these kinds of tactics against Obama. Cause you know, the Obama campaign won’t be shy about fighting dirty.
I understand that national politics is not for the fastidious, but my concern is that these tactics put any user on the slippery slope to seeking power for power’s sake.
Which leads me, when I hear ‘say anything to be President’, to recall ‘Read my lips’.
(President Gingrich might not propose a VAT as a “solution” to the fiscal crisis. President Romney “reluctantly” would, IMO.)
And now Huckabee is a big fan.