You make some very good points. The down side of that approach is you run the risk of letting your opponent construct a public persona of you that will be hard to shake. i believe it is happening already. Most voters, even republicans, are beginning to think of Romney as a callous rich guy who made a lot of money through financial engineering and Gordon Gecko-type asset stripping. The republicans used to be pretty good at creating an unattractive persona of their opponents. You could ask Mike Dukakis, Al Gore and John Kerry about it. For some reason, the geniuses running McCain's campaign didn;t want to go there. I fear the same thing happening again. Romney's task is pretty simple: he has to make the election a referendum on Obama, Obama's record and his fitness to be president. That isn't happening because Romney is busy responding to smear ads.
That's exactly why I said to stop trying to rebut smear ads. The correct response is something like, "Is that the best you can do?" Laugh them off as flailing bullies on the playground and deliver a line about how you believe in the industrious and innovative spirit of America that will continue to establish us as the great white city on a hill that everyone wants to come to. How the small business owner and 9-5ers have a bunch of fight left in them and are able to carry us into the next great expansion. Save the attacks until the final round when your opponent has exhausted all resources and won't have time to regroup.
A good ad would to have a mother walk in on a child and it appears the child is snorting cocaine. Mom: What are you doing? Child: Snorting some coke. Obama did it and hes my role model. Mom(turns and looks at the camera): Thanks Obama Voice over: Do you want a President who admitted to being part of a drug gang?
BTW, just in case anyone here is trying to make the assertion that one campaign is more dishonest than the other. They really aren't that far off. Maybe if I get some time I will count up only those comments made about the opponent to see if one is less honest in their criticism. Keep in mind too, that many times these statements are ranked as false due to perceived ownership rather than on the verbiage. I.E. Romney will make a factual statement, but politifact will give it a false rating because it "isn't Obama's fault".
Politifact goes hardcore left, half the time Obama and his team tells a blatant lie they just dont bother to rate it, you will notice that there is nothing on there site with the latest ad saying Romney killed some woman by taking her healthcare away, and they also didnt bother rating the numerous lies that went along with it from Obama's campaign stafff where they tried to disassociate themselves from the attack ad..... They are notorious for this, they will rank every single lie that comes out from a republican then just not bother giving a ranking to most of the lefts egregious lies. Notice on their front page how supposedly the "battle of the week" is the welfare thing, when really this week has mostly been about Obamas blatant lie about Romney killing the woman, but they wont ever bother to rank that one, they do this all the time. Factcheck.org and the washington post fact checkers are far less biased.
Not if you get rid of the repeats. There are many dual entries on the Romney side that aren't on the Obama side. Go to the site and click on "pants on fire" for both candidates. Romney has 14 listed, but only 9 are original. The others are repeats. All 6 of Obama's are original. I just didn't want to get into that much detail. The point is that each of them has a bunch of truths and a bunch of falsehoods. The differences aren't great enough to determine whether one is more dishonest than the other.
Yeah but first everything needs one small screen which hurts obama immensely."stupid as fricken hell"