The best word in this BuzzFeed story: “vet.” It’s about time the president’s character got some scrutiny.
In speeches from Des Moines to Dallas, Romney has always been careful to hedge his tough digs at Obama with a civil nod toward the president’s moral character: “He’s a nice guy,” the Republican has often said. “He just has no idea how the private economy works.” But Tuesday’s speech included no such hedge — and one campaign adviser said there’s a reason for that.
“[Romney] has said Obama’s a nice fellow, he’s just in over his head,” the adviser said. “But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he’s really disappointed. He believes it’s time to vet the president. He really hasn’t been vetted; McCain didn’t do it.”
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“I mean, this is a guy who admitted to cocaine use, had a sweetheart deal with his house in Chicago, and was associated and worked with Rod Blagojevich to get Valerie Jarrett appointed to the Senate,” the adviser said. “The bottom line is there’ll be counterattacks.”
The reference to Obama’s past drug use seems to suggest that former New Hampshire Governor John Sununu wasn’t going off-script after all when he dinged the president for spending “his early years in Hawaii smoking something” during a Tuesday morning Fox News appearance.
It was Obama campaign spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter who awakened Mitt’s rage. She crossed a line when she suggested that Romney is a felon, an attack that followed the earlier Democrat attack on Ann Romney.
“[Obama’s] policies have been such utter failures, the only thing he can do is to try to destroy a decent man and his wife,” the adviser said. “So he gets some hack political adviser from Chicago who has nothing to point to in her own life, and tells her to call him a felon… When did our politics get to that point? I mean, it’s Nixonian.”
Our politics got to that point when we put an unaccomplished man of low character into the White House. That man was Bill Clinton, who spent 8 years wallowing in dishonesty and turning the White House into a combination campaign motel and brothel. Those years taught the Democrats some lessons, among them, that it’s possible to get by in politics without a real record of achievement and truth no longer beats sophistry. Barack Obama is starting to make Slick Willie look like a choirboy, at least on the honesty front, and he is far less capable of leadership than Clinton even was.
It’s four years past time he was vetted.
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