This campaign is out of control. What we're seeing is utter desperation. I'm not even sure how they'll be able to deal with all this crap during the debates. But that's probably part of the strategy. Throw so much garbage out there that the opposition can't deal with all of it.
New Obama super PAC cancer ad stretches truth: Will Obama renounce it?Share posted at 2:21 pm on August 7, 2012
by Howard Portnoy
An earlier article in this space noted that pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action has released an outrageous ad that attempts to link Mitt Romney to the cancer death of a Kansas City resident. The woman who succumbed to that dread disease was the wife of a steelworker at a plant in the city that went bankrupt some years after it was acquired by Bain Capital.
The ad was a reach to start with. Romney was no longer running Bain when the company, GST Steel, filed Chapter 11. But it turns out the heartrending story in the ad plays fast and loose with the facts. (h/t reader letget).
The basic outlines of the narrative are accurate. Joe Soptic, the man the ad focuses on, was an employee of GST’s Kansas City plant. His claim that he and his family lost their health insurance when the plant closed seems plausible. It also factual that Soptic’s wife was diagnosed with stage-4 cancer, which ultimately caused her death.
But here is where the narrative runs afoul of the unvarnished truth. Soptic’s claim that his wife became ill “a short time after” the plant closed in 2002 and died “22 days later” does not comport with the facts.
As Alexander Burn writes at Politico:
A 2006 story in the Kansas City Star reported the death of Ranae Soptic, a former champion roller skater: ‘Soptic went to the hospital for pneumonia, but doctors found signs of very advanced cancer, and she died two weeks later on June 22.’
The woman’s death occurred four years after the plant was closed. It is possible that Soptic’s memory is faulty and that he simply misremembers the exact chronology of the events of that period. As Burns notes, “The lapse in time between the plant closing and Soptic’s death doesn’t mean the ad is invalid, but it raises questions about the cause and effect relationship here.”
Burns reached out to Bill Burton, Priorities USA strategist and a former Obama spokesman, about the seeming discrepancy. Burton responded:
We’re illustrating how long it took for communities and individuals to recover from the closing of these businesses. Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost.
But it appears Burton’s “illustration” runs outside the lines. Will the Obama campaign renounce the ad?
http://hotair.com/greenroom/archives/2012/08/07/new-obama-super-pac-cancer-ad-stretches-truth-will-obama-renounce-it/
