Today’s Politico has one of those “a plague on both your houses” pieces, this one by Reid J. Epstein headlined “Campaign 2012 turns into a nasty schoolyard brawl.” As Epstein tells it
“The decline began as soon as Romney clinched the nomination. The Republican candidate’s staffers, annoyed they weren’t getting the respect they felt they deserved from Obama’s staffers, sent a bus honking at those lined up to enter the president’s rallies and dispatched bubble-blowing hecklers to an Obama press conference held in Boston, Romney’s backyard. Small-bore as it was, the stunts got under the skin of Obama’s details and protocol-obsessed campaign, and they couldn’t let go. Before long, they dispatched former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell to appear at a Romney stop at a Wawa convenience store. And they made a show of ordering cookies from a bakery Romney had slighted.”
Ya know, I wonder why it’s the job of a president’s campaign staffers to show “respect” for a guy who’s saying that their guy has done a terrible job and deserves to get kicked out on his ass. And, to me, sending “bubble-blowing hecklers” to a president’s press conference sounds a tad more tacky than ordering cookies from a bakery that Romney had somehow dissed. And I also wonder if claiming that the “small-bore” stunts by the Romney folks “got under the skin of Obama’s details and protocol-obsessed campaign, and they couldn’t let go” falls into the category of “objective journalism.”
On top of that, Epstein tells us “Romney speaks from the stump about ‘Candidate Obama.’ The president refers to ‘Mister Romney.’” Yeah, that’s apples to apples. Totally. What’s Obama supposed to call Mitt, “His Highness”?
