It’s interesting to compare the MoveOn.org ad on Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital history with this End of Days trailer for the movie produced by the Gingrich Super PAC Winning Our Future. The MoveOn ad gives us the testimony of one person who was victimized by Bain. This ad weaves a story about true capitalism versus Romney and Bain, who are characterized as “corporate raiders”, and then hits us with the testimony of Romney’s victims. I don’t know about the whole movie, but this trailer could be re-branded and used by the Obama campaign as-is.
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[…] As mistermix pointed out, this isn’t all that different from the ad that MoveOn.org created: […]
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[…] that with the “documentary” Newt’s people are putting out there (well, a Super PAC that, of course, has no actual contact with the Gingrich campaign, but sure as […]
Triassic Sands
When Romney was destroying jobs and wrecking lives, I wonder if he wore the same idiotic grin that seems to be plastered to his face every waking minute now?
It’s the kind of smile that has “fuck you” written all over it. It’s creepy.
Schlemizel
@Triassic Sands:
My guess it was an even bigger grin as he mentally counted the coins he was collecting.
I do hope some of the Dem superpacs show a little love for these Bain videos while the primaries are still in play. Not that I think it will affect the nomination but simply to establish who Willard really is and distance the Dems from the work. It will be great if Noot can do the job for us but we should do whatever we can to help him identify Willard as the Job Cremator.
Triassic Sands
@Schlemizel:
Gingrich seems to want to do exactly that, but he’s so unlikable that at least 3/4 of his audience probably comes away from listening to him hating him and barely thinking about Romney.
Linda Featheringill
I saw that trailer last night and thought it was pretty funny. The whole thing had an air of a melodrama about it, although that wouldn’t necessarily be bad. Also, life itself is frequently melodramatic.
I assume that all the accusations are true.
“Their misery started when Mitt Romney came to town.”
LOL.
It would be interesting to show the whole thing and then split it up into several advertisements.
amk
@Triassic Sands: Now tell us, how really feel about willard.
Schlemizel
@Triassic Sands:
True enough but those same people will leave a small amount of their brain open for things said by Republicans while denying the sky is blue because they once heard a Dem say it was.
Thats the demographic I want to get to now.
sb
That’s the marvelous actor David Straithairn doing the voice-over. He’s one of my favorites so if he’s a Gingrich supporter, well… it’s a little early for wine.
Schlemizel
Saw the ad over there –> and thought I was on Savages ‘Slog” as it promised to show me UNCUT men!
Triassic Sands
Santorum would be the second choice to carve up Romney, but he’s almost as unlikable as Newt. Barney Frank’s comments about Santorum seem quite appropriate — he’s one of the meanest people around.
Some of Romney’s Cabinet:
Santorum: Secretary of Morality and Fertility
Gingrich: Secretary of Bitterness and Vengeance
Perry: Secretary of the Loading Dock
Huntsman: Ambassador to the USA (he’ll explain Romney’s policies to the American people — in Chinese)
Paul: Secretary Without Portfolio (his department has been eliminated)
Efroh
The next time I read another article accusing the Democratic party of waging class warfare, I’m going to send the author a link to this trailer.
Applejinx
Be sure and call ’em corporate vultures, not raiders.
Raiders sounds cool and manly.
WereBear
I think the atmosphere for Job Cremators is very sour right now. Romney picked the wrong time to be a front runner!
MikeJ
Benen pointed out something interesting regarding ads attacking Romney :
dmsilev
So, apparently Newt’s SuperPAC has several million dollars to blow with the one mission of tearing down Mitt Romney.
This will be amusing to watch.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@MikeJ: So the time between flipping and flopping is growing shorter. By the time he debates Obama, you’ll barely be able to detect the comma between the clauses.
amk
Benen on my-sons-served-their-country-by-serving-me willard.
It took 12 hours, but Huntsman thought of a good response, explaining in Sunday morning’s debate that he, like his two sons currently serving in the Navy, has been willing to serve under a Democratic president. “I want to be very clear with the people here in New Hampshire and this country — I will always put my country first,” Huntsman said.
Brian Powell flagged Romney’s fascinating retort.
“I think we serve our country first by standing for people who believe in conservative principles, and doing everything in our power to promote an agenda that does not include President Obama’s agenda.”
Think about that for a moment. As far as Romney is concerned, putting country first means putting country second — or perhaps third, behind ideology and party.
Or as Powell put it, “Essentially, he’s saying Americans serve the country best by serving the Republican Party first.”
Brian R.
@Efroh:
My thoughts exactly.
cmorenc
@Schlemizel:
Unfortunately, Newt’s idea of scorching the earth around Romney may focus on torching Romney’s bona fides as a conservative and tarring him as a moderate, rather than on torching Romney’s bona fides as a “job creator” with Bain Capital and tarring him as a job-destroying vulture capitalist.
martha
@amk: Well, it’s a good thing that the Republicans are whack-jobs. The new Huntsman ad “Country First” would win over lots of sane people.
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/updates/3785
amk
via politico
The Texas governor was greeted at a restaurant in Anderson, S.C., by a young woman who posed for a photo with the Texas governor while saying it is “good to see someone as homophobic and racist as you.”
He smiled, took the photo and moved on.
ornery_curmudgeon
“Capitalism made America great, Free Market innovation blah blah blah.”
Good ad and good info, except it reinforces Rightist ideology in our own campaign advertising. How about: individual liberty, hard work and equality before the law made this nation great…?
We have to stop defining ourselves in establishment terms. Some liberals even call themselves ‘leftists’ at the media’s bidding …
Cacti
@amk:
Mitt’s family has a pretty lousy history of service to their country.
His grand-pappy jumped the Mexican border to avoid US anti-polygamy laws. His father didn’t serve in WWII, Mitt didn’t serve in Vietnam, none of his 5 sons have served in Iraq or Afghanistan.
Mitt would say we have “volunteer armed forces” but all of them volunteered multiple years to serve as Mormon missionaries. In Mitt’s case, it kept him from getting shot at in SE Asia.
After a profitable career of corporate raiding, Mitt took up politics because he thought it his patrician right to have titles like Senator, Governor, or POTUS next to his name.
Romneys are Mormons first, Republicans second, Americans a distant third.
amk
@martha: too little, too late from huntsman.
martha
@amk: Agreed. Fortunately.
rikryah
this is on point
Aimai
Holy shit I’d pretty much vote for anyone who would run that ad. Hope the dems run it for obama.
rikryah
how did his Willard’s father get out of serving in WWII?
of course, I still don’t understand how, when he was BORN IN MEXICO, he was allowed to run for President.
rlrr
@Cacti:
Romneys are Mormons first, Republicans second, Americans a distant third.
You might switch the first two. Speculation on why Romney won’t disclose his tax returns is that they may reveal he doesn’t give the required 10% of his income to the Mormon church…
rlrr
@rikryah:
Because he’s a white Republican.
Roger Moore
@MikeJ:
He took those 14 seconds to download one of the ads. Romneybot2012 has been upgraded with 4G wireless internet so he can do that kind of thing.
WereBear
Precisely my thoughts. On the other hand, when have the mass of people taken Noot seriously? By the time the less-invested lift their heads, I hope we will be full-on “Mitt Romeny as Mr Burns successfully finding the reverse aging process.”
dmsilev
The Romneytronic 3000 really needs a speech filter upgrade. Via TPM, his latest utterance:
Noted.
RalfW
For the moment, it looks like Obama was preternaturally brilliant: his Win the Future meme in the state of the union address seemed lame.
But now Gingrich’s superpac seems to be, basically, campaigning for Obama under an uncannily similar name.
May backfire twice, since Newtie ain’t exactly corporate-money free, now is he?
chopper
@Roger Moore:
he’s flip-flopping within a single statement. pretty soon he’s going to be able to switch positions on the quantum level and create a singularity.
chopper
@dmsilev:
and, since quoting people out of context is just fine by mittens,
cmorenc
@cmorenc:
Well, dang we might imminently be about to see pigs flying from Newt’s camp after all. According to an article at the NBC Politics Website, Gingrich may be about to do just that: direct a flamethrower at Romney as a “ruthless corporate raider” vulture capitalist while at Bain, arguing to GOP primary voters in SC that this therefore will make Romney-as-nominee vulnerable to attacks from Democrats. I’ll believe it when I see it, but it might just happen after all.
MikeJ
@chopper: If we cloned Mittens we could use quantum entanglement for FTL messaging. The downside is that we’d have two Romneys, but at least one of them could be sent some distance away.
dmsilev
@chopper: Yep. Live by the out of context quote, die by the out of context quote.
Though, to be fair, the quote doesn’t really ring true. Who here really believes that Romney is capable of ‘liking’ anything?
dmsilev
@MikeJ: Given that he’s reversed himself on everything, it’s fair to say that Romney is his own anti-particle, and thus it can be trivially shown that creating (or annihilating) arbitrary numbers of Romneys doesn’t violate any conservation laws (similar to photons). Also, it implies that Romney has an integer spin number.
RalfW
@Aimai: It’s ultimately weak, tough. There’s no connection to the tag line “unite America, restore trust, defeat Obama.”
Maybe I’m in the tank, but the non-27% whackanoodle public doesn’t distrust Obama (at least not any more than they have most presidents). They distrust (and hate) Congress.
Why would voters want to defeat Obama via his former China ambassador who proudly lifts up his two sons who accept Obama as CIC of the armed forces?
The country first part is great (and points out what a phony John McCain became in ’08 under that slogan), but the ergo vote for Huntsman is missing.
(And he’s waaaaay too conservative for my comfort anyway).
Odie Hugh Manatee
@cmorenc:
The crybabies over at Redstate were pissed as hell at Noot for going after Romney for his Bain bullshit during the Saturday “debate”. Horowitz was upset that Noot was slandering the very thing they worship and ignoring a perfectly legit target; Romneycare and how it paved the way for Obamacare.
Oh, and how lazy everyone will be once they all have healthcare. I guess that he is of the opinion that a job with crappy pay and crappy (or no) insurance will inspire people to better themselves so they can have better insurance.
Yeah, that’s all I ever wanted… government insurance! Now I an sit on my ass and…
live outdoors because I don’t want to work?
Republicans are fucking crazy. Bug-fucking crazy.
Mark S.
This shit is brutal. What Romney did for a living wasn’t much different than Tony Soprano.
Citizen_X
@ornery_curmudgeon: It’s a Gingrich ad.
WereBear
Yeah. What is this obsession they have as seeing humanity as something that, without flogging, would curl up on a couch and eat Cheetos, even unto death?
Projection in 3D or something?
Redshift
@RalfW:
Bizarrely, Newt was actually using the name first. It seems strange he’d use it for campaign purposes after Obama started using it as a catchphrase, but there you are.
Redshift
@RalfW:
Yeah, I agree. NPR was (for some unconscionable reason) talking to Pat Buchanan about New Hampshire yesterday, and before I switched it off, they asked if he thought Republicans really agreed on enough to be able to come together in the fall. Crazy Uncle Pat said oh, yes, they’d come together, because they all agree that for the good of the country, Obama must be defeated.
My immediate thought was that if the only thing you agree on is that the other party should lose, you don’t have anything you agree on. Telling that even Pat Buchanan couldn’t come up with any better BS.
xian
@Redshift: it’s not that strange. in his own twisted bizarro-world way, Newt is a progressive. Just not a liberal or a leftist, of course.
jibeaux
@Redshift: For what it’s worth, this is pretty much why I believed Bush wasn’t going to win in 2004. I hope it works as well for them as it worked for me…
Schlemizel
@cmorenc:
Yes, but if he is on board for a variation on this particular video we should encourage him to carry it the whole way. Piling on should be encouraged.
I don’t think most people know ‘Citizens For the American Way’ from ‘Americans For Progress’ or almost any of these douche outfits (the exception being MoveOn) so a Dem superpac could just happen to run this in SC next week & it would blend in quite nicely with what the GOP is doing to itself anyway.
Cervantes
@sb: I can’t say for sure whose voice it is, but I doubt Strathairn is a Gingrich supporter. He made an ad for Kirsten Gillibrand in 2006; his voice narrated the video that introduced Barack Obama at the 2008 Democratic convention; and in 2009 he performed in an adaptation of Howard Zinn’s work.
Villago Delenda Est
@rikryah:
He ran for a nomination. He never got to the point where his eligibility was brought into play to actually be on the ballot in the general.
Schlemizel
@cmorenc:
It shouldn’t be a complete surprise as the GOP has tried mightily over the last 40 years to claim the populist mantle. Of course it is completely fake & dishonest but they really have done a hell of a job in convincing morans everywhere that they really care about them. Willard does not dare try to play that game so its a pretty short hop for Noot to point to the anti-populist actions of Bain & its boss. In the long run it may even be a good thing for the party as they can still pretend to be populists at heart.
WaterGirl
@RalfW: I am so glad Obama dropped that Win the Future line, I was so afraid that was going to be their replacement for Yes We Can. I cringed every time I heard it. I laughed when I saw that Newt was (basically) using it.
harlana
@rlrr:
that would be awesome!
harlana
i despise Leroy Newt but I haven’t seen any anti-Romney ads coming out of his campaign that weren’t basically true
burritoboy
Re George Romney (Mitt’s dad):
Anybody who’s born to two American citizens is a native-born citizen. It doesn’t matter where they were physically born. John McCain was born in a military hospital in Panama, for instance (though, in addition to both his parents being American citizens, the hospital itself was on an American military base and thus “in the USA”).
4jkb4ia
It was startling to see “Corporations are people” used as part of a Republican ad. I hadn’t seen the video, but Romney seemed as if he was speaking with real warmth and conviction there–was a real person. The best spin you could put on that was that Romney is most comfortable at the interface between corporations and people. Not something that will cause him to score high on “Understands the needs and problems of people like you”.
amk
via politico, private equity group council (an union of thugs ?) weighs in
“And today, with attacks on Romney’s Bain record intensifying, the Private Equity Growth Capital Council has released a statement from interim president and CEO Steve Judge defending the industry in broad terms:
“There is a lot of misinformation being spread, purely for political purposes and on both sides of the aisle, as it pertains to private equity. What’s been lost is an understanding of the critical role that private equity investment plays in growing the U.S. economy and delivering more than a trillion dollars in investment returns to pension funds, endowments and charitable foundations. While the business model has evolved over time, the fact of the matter is private equity provides capital and operational expertise to companies that are often underperforming or on the brink of failure. In 2010 alone, private equity invested nearly $150 billion in U.S. companies. As a result, many businesses grow and are strengthened and often jobs are created over the long term.”
How easily these guys lie.
Citizen_X
@chopper:
Romney: “I like being able to fire people.”
Perry: “I like being able to execute people.”
Gingrich: “I like being able to fire my wife and hire a new one.”
Santorum: “I like Santorum.”
Paul: “I like being able to hire GOLD! And white people”
Citizen_X
@amk:
Oh, now that’s reassuring. Keep defending yourselves without your PR people to obscure the issues, 1%ers!
amk
@Citizen_X: That claim is an utter lie given the job scenario now and given that these fuckers were the ones that killed them in the first place.
amk
Ezra Klein
///
patrick the pedantic literalist
@Ezra Klein via amk:
Romney originated the comparison, saying his 100,000 jobs created is more than Obama’s in his entire term as president. If Romney is going to set unfair, and mathematically incoherent, debate terms it is ok by me if democrats make him live by them.
Also see: “I like to fire people.” above.
grape_crush
Romney Apocalypse
Too wordy.
Rompocalypse?
Mittageddon?
Phoenician in a time of Romans
I like that starting bit…
“Soliciting seed money from South American investors [brief pause so people can connect the dots]…”
nastybrutishntall
The Dems have all this great archival footage of Romney at Bain showing his glee at slashing the fat from payroll. But some oppo still needs doing. For instance:
Does he feel that Huey Lewis has stood the test of time, and is his later material really worthy of the canon? Also — who makes his suits?