Barack Obama, why can’t you be more of a socialist? That’s the new message from the GOP, apparently. Here’s news of a new anti-Obama attack ad:
A conservative non-profit will spend $3.4 million to tie President Barack Obama to the financial industry in a minute-long television ad airing in seven general election battlegrounds, the group said Monday.
American Future Fund … goes after the president in the new spot for claiming to be a Wall Street reformer while taking massive contributions from financial sector employees….
“Guess who gave $42 million to Obama’s last campaign for president?” a narrator in the spot asks. “Wall Street bankers and financial insiders, more than any other candidate in history.”
… The ad concludes with the statement, “Obama won’t admit to supporting Wall Street, but Wall Street sure supports president Obama.”
So this right-wing group with Romney ties apparently thinks Obama wasn’t nasty enough to banks. And Byron York tells us that the Romney campaign thinks Obama’s auto bailout was mean and nasty to middle-class car dealers:
The Obama campaign has released a new ad holding Mitt Romney responsible for the loss of 750 jobs in the bankruptcy of a steel plant purchased by Romney’s Bain Capital in 1993….
How will Romney respond? … look for the Romney campaign and its surrogates to counterattack by focusing on an instance in which Barack Obama, in essence, took over a company and laid people off in an effort to save the larger enterprise.
That was, of course, the auto bailouts, and while Obama often cites his success in “saving” the car industry, few remember today how many (non-union) workers lost their jobs in the Obama administration’s handling of the matter. During the economic crisis, General Motors and Chrysler shut down more than 700 dealerships, resulting in the loss of tens of thousands of jobs.
… the auto bailouts, whatever else one thinks of them, Barack Obama pushed for downsizing and laying people off in a failing business he had taken over.
In other words, yes, Mitt Romney was a heartless, Mr. Potter-style SOB at Bain Capital — the same kind of heartless, Mr. Potter-style SOB that empathy-challenged skinflint Barack Obama was when dealing with car dealers! Where was Obama’s Capraesque empathy?
And getting back to Wall Street, there’s this story from Ben White of Politico, which appears with curiously Romney-friendly timing, given that it shows up at the same time as that Obama attack on Romney’s record at Bain:
The giant $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase highlights a central problem in President Barack Obama’s case for a second term: Four years after the financial crisis nearly brought the nation to its knees, very little appears to have changed.
No high-profile bank executives are in jail. Special multi-agency task forces to go after financial fraud and mortgage market abuses appeared in State of the Union addresses, only to issue a few news releases and mostly vanish from public view.
And now one of the largest banks in the United States, headed by a Democrat and operating with government guarantees, has turned in the kind of headline-grabbing, casino-style loss that drives voters crazy and that Obama’s financial reform bill was supposed to stop….
The JPMorgan debacle raises a critical question: Has the president demonstrated enough strength in taking on Wall Street? …
In the wake of the financial meltdown, there’s plenty of reason to criticize Obama’s record on comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. But that criticism has to come from the left. Apparently, though, the level of hypocrisy and shamelessness in GOP Land is sufficiently high that it’s also going to come from the right.
(X-posted at No More Mister Nice Blog.)
