October panic for mid-August
By Wes Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
Panic
is never pretty, and it leads men to say foolish
things – even presidents and their friends and
flunkies. The wicked flee when none pursue, but
sometimes they flee when facts are gaining on them.
Harry
Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority in the
Senate, should know better than to make up stuff
that won’t stand scrutiny, panic or not. His tall
tale about how Mitt Romney didn’t pay taxes for 10
years blew up under scrutiny and when the tale
exploded in the face of the Las Vegas boodle man the
president suffered the collateral damage.
Yesterday the Obama campaign tried to wash its
hands, Pontius Pilate-like, of that campaign
commercial featuring Joe Boptic, a laid-off
steelworker, telling how his wife died of cancer
because Mr. Romney’s Bain Capital closed a bankrupt
Kansas City steel mill in 2001 and left his family
without health insurance.
The
steelworker’s heartbreaking story, as told in the ad
put up by an “independent” campaign group called
Priorities USA, doesn’t stand close scrutiny,
either. But it was briefly effective, which is all
that counts when it’s panic time.
The
Obama campaign naturally denies any and all
responsibility. This is the usual first response of
the guilty. “We have nothing, no involvement, with
any ads that are done by Priorities USA,” an Obama
spokesman told reporters aboard Air Force One. “We
don’t have any knowledge of the story of the
family.” The deputy Obama campaign manager repeated
the assurance to CNN: “I don’t know the facts about
when Mr. Soptic’s wife got sick, or the facts about
his health insurance.”
That
sounds pretty unequivocal, but this was soon
overtaken by the facts. Politico reported that the
Obama campaign had hosted a conference call on May
14, only three months ago, featuring Joe Soptic
telling his sad story, that after he lost his job in
2001 he had no health insurance until he found a job
as a janitor, but there were no health benefits for
his wife. When she was diagnosed with lung cancer he
had to put her in the county hospital. When she died
“all I got was an enormous bill. It’s upsetting what
Mitt Romney and his partners did to us.” (Has anyone
got a rope? Let’s get Mitt and find a tree with a
low-hanging limb.)
As
sad as the story was, from Mr. Obama’s perspective
it was too good to be true. Mr. Soptic’s wife had
health insurance all the time through her own
employer until 2003, when she was injured and could
no longer work. That’s when she lost her insurance.
Still a sad story, but nothing like the story the
White House put out in May, and Priorities USA
repeated in August.
This
was only a little better than Harry Reid’s
confection, which was made up entirely. The senator
cited as his source “a man” at Bain Capital – a
source no better than “a friend’s ex-wife’s yard
man’s sister-in-law.” The White House denied any
knowledge of the Reid fantasia, too, and chided
reporters for asking about it.
Dirty
tricks are old stuff, of course, but the explosion
of whistleblowers and fact-checkers on the Internet
have rendered it all but impossible to keep a
campaign lie alive. Nevertheless, politicians are
born with the urge to tell whoppers in the spirit of
Lyndon B. Johnson. In a torrid Texas race years ago
LBJ told an aide to put out the story that his
opponent was once caught taking sexual liberties
with a pig. “But that’s not true,” the offended aide
(maybe it was the Rev. Billy Don Moyers) replied. “I
know it’s not true,” LBJ said, “but let him deny
it.”
A
famous reckless lie was told by another senator in
Wheeling, W. Va., in February 1950, when he pulled a
sheet of paper from his pocket and told the ladies
of the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling: “I have
here in my hand a list of 57 names that were made
known to the secretary of state as members of the
Communist Party and who nevertheless are still
working and shaping policy in the State Department.”
With that Sen. Joe McCarthy was off and running in
his hunt for Communists in the government. Unlike
Harry Reid, Mr. McCarthy was eventually proved to be
only 95 percent wrong.
Barack Obama is trying to stand above the action in
the gutter, not necessarily because he wants to
preserve the honor and dignity of office, but
because it wouldn’t look good for everyone to see
him sweat in August. That’s panic for late October.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington
Times.