Do note, this comes from a left-wing paper.
The shout from the crowd was clear. As President Barack Obama gave the first official campaign speech of his re-election bid at a sports arena in Ohio last weekend the first mention of his Republican opponent Mitt Romney prompted a male voice in the throng to yell: “Traitor!”
Earlier in the rally, held in the Ohio state capital of Columbus, several warm-up speakers for Obama had derided and mocked Romney for once using a Swiss bank account. Campaign videos played to the audience had prompted loud boos when Romney appeared or was mentioned…
“People look at Romney, and he is the personification of everything that is wrong with the system,” said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a web-based group that campaigns on progressive causes. Ruben said the group had recently taken an internal poll of its left-wing members and been surprised that 68% of them felt Romney was as bad as or worse than President George W Bush as an American politician. “That was striking. I was not sure that our members had a scale that went beyond Bush,” Ruben said.
Obama apologists will distinguish this from Monday’s incident with Romney by noting there’s no proof that O heard this guy whereas Mitt obviously did hear the questioner with the microphone. (Never mind that Romney’s typical line on O is that he’s a “nice guy” who’s in over his head or that Mitt later emphasized that of course he disagreed with the questioner.) It didn’t matter in 2008 whether McCain or Palin heard some guy allegedly yell “kill him” at the mention of Bill Ayers’s name, which over time metamorphosed into a bogus claim that the “kill him” comment had been directed at Obama, and which persists to this day even though the whole story ended up being bogus. Supposedly, the “kill him” thing was a grand insight into the dark souls of Republican voters, irrespective of McCain’s feelings about it or whether he even knew about it. How much Romney-hatred will it take from O-bots before the media starts running similar dumb concern-troll stories about the sinister “anger” or whatever among his constituents? Class-warfare campaigns have been known to stir up some pretty bitter resentments, don’tcha know.
Exit question: If 68% of the MoveOn crowd is already treating Romney as worse than the Bushitler, where will that number be circa Election Day? And will that insane figure affect any media calculations about the terrible rigid partisanship that grips the land, or will that continue to be pawned off as some uniquely Republican failing?
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