Obama campaign to media: Stop letting Romney off the hook

[babylonsister]

Now if only they'd listen.

Obama campaign to media: Stop letting Romney off the hook
Posted at 01:40 PM ET, 06/04/2012
By Greg Sargent


On a conference call with reporters just now, top Obama adviser David Axelrod pressed media figures with unusual directness to hold the Mitt Romney campaign accountable for its core claims about the two candidates’ economic records.

Specifically, Axelrod argued at length that the Romney campaign has been operating from a double standard. Romney aides defend him against Dem attacks on his record as Governor of Massachusetts by pointing out that he inherited an economy losing jobs, and that this shouldn’t detract from the assessment of the true impact of his policies. This, even as they slam Obama over the “net” job loss on his watch, a metric that does include the huge job losses at the start of Obama’s term.

“Go back to the Romney campaign and ask them about this extraordinary double standard,” Axelrod said on the call.

“Ask them how it is that they should exempt Governor Romney’s first years in office because he had to encounter a recession far less deep than the one the president had to face,” Axelrod continued.

“The’ve painted themselves into a corner here,” Axelrod concluded. “Now that double standard is clear, and they’re going to have to explain it to the American people.” Steve Benen has a roundup of the relevant quotes from Romney aides that illustrate the double standard.

This may be the most explicit pressure yet from the Obama campaign on the press to stop letting Romney’s core assertions go without scrutiny. To be clear, the press is sometimes very tough on Romney, but it usually has to do with matters like Eric Fehrnstrom’s Etch-A-Sketch moment or Donald Trump’s birtherism — passing flare-ups of the moment. Rarely do you see meaningful or sustained national media scrutiny of the core claims that underlie Romney’s whole case for the presidency — such as his constant use of the “net” job loss figure about Obama, and, now, the use of a different standard for himself.

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/obama-campaign-to-media-stop-letting-romney-off-the-hook/2012/06/04/gJQAuM1mDV_blog.html

[zbdent]

1. "Now if only they'd listen." ... I'm wishing for a pony ...

which is about as likely to happen ... maybe even more likely ...