During Monday’s press conference, President Obama distanced himself from the Priorities USA ad in which Joe Soptic blames his wife’s cancer death on Mitt Romney. Bill Burton heads Priorities USA and was President Obama’s deputy chief of staff prior to leaving the administration to run that super PAC.
The president said that his campaign did not authorize the Soptic ad, and said that he does not believe that there is a connection between Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain and the death, by cancer, of Mrs. Soptic.
But this slide from the Obama campaign website suggests a different story.
The slideshow, called GST Steel, is still live on the Obama campaign web site. The slide show blames Mitt Romney for GST’s bankruptcy, despite the fact that GST’s failure happened two years after Mitt Romney left Bain Capital to save the Salt Lake City Olympics. The Joe Soptic slide is right here.
The president knew how many times the Soptic ad ran on TV, but he also knows that the number of times an ad runs doesn’t tell the whole story of a political ad. The most inflammatory ads usually get the least amount of airtime, but generate the most buzz online. They usually come from groups outside the campaign, to give the campaign and the candidate some distance from the ad in case it backfires, as the Soptic ad has.
If the president did not sanction the Soptic ad and does not believe in a connection between Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain and Mrs. Soptic’s death seven years later, then what is the purpose of that slide in the GST Steel slideshow?
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