I hope it’s not too obvious to note this. But there’s another aspect of the Bain storm that is critical to recognize. Mitt Romney has had a disastrous few days. Maybe it will go on for another day or another week. But at some not too distant point in the future we’ll be on to something else. And yet both campaigns get that this skirmish is a battle for one of the biggest prizes of the whole campaign.
The Obama campaign is hitting this so hard to take a series of associations and embed them so deeply into voters’ consciousness that they become inseparable from the mention of the phrase ‘Bain Capital’. Those are ‘joke’, ‘liar’, ‘felon’, ‘retroactively retired’, ‘SEC filings’, ‘Caymans’, ‘whiner’, ‘buck stops here’, ‘hiding something’. Read More
Ed Gillespie is catching a world of criticism this morning for ‘retroactively retired‘ and the whole Mitt team is getting lectured on extremely poor handling of offshore accounts, outsourcing, and Romney’s quantum physics approach to having been CEO and not CEO of Bain at the same time. But any campaign operative or observer will tell you that it’s very, very difficult for a campaign to be more forthcoming, agile or aware than the candidate himself. Read More
Defending Mitt Romney this morning, Romney advisor Ed Gillespie said John Kerry had similarly released only 2 years of tax returns. Actually, he released 20 years.
I spent some time yesterday drilling down on the audio engineering of the new Obama ad that everyone is talking about (here, here, and here) because I was interested in the technical aspects and, frankly, have zero personal knowledge on the topic.
But I want to pull back from that discussion of the nuts and bolts to focus on a larger point about the ad that emerged in emails I exchanged with readers who are in the film biz: This ad has far and away better production values than most political ads. It really sets itself apart.
But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what a couple of directors I was talking to had to say about it: Read More
More from TPM Reader JH:
Please forgive me persisting about this, but again, as a professional sound guy, I’m really gratified that people suddenly have a lot to say about what I do for a living and have so many insightful observations.
A more extended dissection of the audio techniques in the new Obama ad, from TPM Reader WB: Read More