Last updated on May 19th, 2012 at 01:36 pm
Flip flopping has truly become a well-perfected art form for Team Romney. Guess they’re taking their queue from the Big Guy.
Here in the past day or so, there was this (almost) Big Story about how one of the GOP Super PACs was thinking seriously about launching what some in the decision-making chairs were convinced would be a devastating attack ad against President Obama. One of the Chief Brains In Charge had determined that one of the best ways to bring Obama to his knees would be to connect him (again) to his once-upon-a-time pastor Jeremiah Wright.
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For those who may have forgotten, Wright is the fire-breathing, controversial pastor from Chicago’s South Side who Obama was forced to repudiate to save his campaign based on an excerpt from one of Wright’s sermons that was blown hugely out of context and replayed over and over and over again. That, plus Wright’s extremely poor handling of the fallout in subsequent press conferences (particularly the one at the National Press Club), didn’t give Obama much choice but to distance himself from the man who had performed the marriage ceremony between him and Michelle and who had been a friend and something of a spiritual mentor for years.
From the Times:
The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,†says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.
The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.â€
The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American†who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.â€
Except that Obama cut Wright loose four years ago. Painful though it may have been on a personal level, Obama knew what he had to do, friendship or no, and he did it. Â At the time, that spineless war hero wimp John McCain didn’t have the stones to use Wright as a club to beat up on Obama, and some Republicans apparently never forgave him for refusing to sell all of his soul and daring to hang on to at least some measure of class – even though they did somehow manage to overlook and/or forgive his decision to turn a deaf ear to his better judgment and choose Sarah Palin to be his veep. Â Go figure.
Anyway, here it is 2012 and now they figure it’s time to dig up that dead body of an issue and have it point its bony, accusatory finger at Obama, reminding everyone (mostly white people) of what a true black radical Muslim racist ‘other’ he really is. Which, of course, would explain the title of the Republican Super PAC campaign playbook that was somehow leaked to the New York Times by a staffer who was troubled by the playbook’s contents; “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama; the Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”
Note the presence of the middle name. It’s not potent enough to defeat Barack Obama. They have to defeat Barack Hussein Obama.
But then? Later on the same day? May 17? Somebody else in another Team Romney decision-makers chair decided maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all to try and tie Obama to his ex-pastor whom he cut off long ago.  So another ‘whoops, my bad’ story had to be run to clean up the mess. Could have even been Romney who pulled the plug, although I’m guessing he would have had to do it through channels since there isn’t supposed to be any direct contact between the candidate and his Attack PAC. That’s what they say anyway.
All that money those Super PACs are raising, and this is what they come up with?
Keith Owens (AKA Black Liberal Boomer) is a Detroit-based writer who has worked for The Detroit Free Press, Detroit’s alternative newsweekly the Metro Times, the Fort Lauderdale Sun Sentinel, and other newspapers. He was also a nationally syndicated columnist with Universal Press Syndicate for three years beginning in 1993.
