Mitt Muffs the Response. Again.

The advertising proposal obtained by the NYT

There’s little left to say about the noxious super PAC proposal for a $10 million “How to Defeat Barack Hussein Obama” ad campaign. Even Joe Ricketts, the TD Ameritrade billionaire who considered backing the ad tying the president to controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright, has disowned the effort, claiming through a spokesperson that “it reflects an approach to politics that Mr. Ricketts rejects and it was never a plan to be accepted but only a suggestion for a direction to take.” Whether Ricketts would have rejected the strategy had the Times article not provoked such an outcry is up for debate; the president of Ricketts’ super PAC “said only that no decisions had been made,” and the 54-page proposal mentions receiving his “preliminary approval at the New York meeting.”

The world of conservative super PAC funders is full of unsavory characters, however, from Sheldon Adelson (under investigation for bribing officials in Macau) to Foster Friess (noted advocate of aspirin as birth control) to the Koch brothers (specializing in climate change denial). That any of these figures would fund a race-baiting ad referring to Obama as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln” comes as no surprise, just as it came as no surprise that the right-wing media shrugged at the news, deeming Rev. Wright “fair game” as a campaign issue. But who would have thought the politician to emerge from the kerfuffle looking the worst would be Mitt Romney? Romney’s reaction to the Ricketts proposal, not the standard-issue political slime of the proposal itself — that is what deserves more discussion.

Romney’s tepid “repudiation” of the proposal’s tactics became the latest entry in a list of weak-willed, soft-spined failures to stand up to the extremist elements of the Republican party. The candidate who bills himself as a strong leader shows precious little leadership when he refuses to condemn misogynistic remarks by Rush Limbaugh (“slut” and “prostitute” were “not the words I would have used” for Sandra Fluke) and neglects to challenge an audience member at a campaign rally who accuses the president of “treason.” Romney can’t even issue a real apology, opting to express regret “if there’s anything I said that was offensive to anyone” rather than offer a sincere “I’m sorry” for assaulting a classmate in high school.

Now, Romney buries his rejection of a truly odious smear tactic under a heap of complaints not about the relevant conservative bile but about how “character assassination has become the nature” of Obama’s campaign. It takes a lot of nerve to whine that “instead of talking about our respective ideas, what’s he’s doing is trying to attack me on a personal basis” when Romney’s own supporters are trying to brand the president as a “hyper-partisan, hyper-liberal elitist” who has “brought this country to its knees.” No, calling Obama “bumbling” and “crude” isn’t attacking him on a personal basis! Blasting the president’s “incompetence, his inability to focus on the problem at hand and his overtly political forays that make him look like he’s got something to hide” is apparently nothing compared to the Obama campaign’s attacks on Romney’s record as a “vampire capitalist.”

The statement by Romney’s campaign manager tries to shift the blame to everyone else and is, at least to my ears, the height of arrogance. Romney is dodging responsibility for the negative tone of a race in which his own rhetoric has been consistently negative:

Unlike the Obama campaign, Gov. Romney is running a campaign based on jobs and the economy, and we encourage everyone else to do the same. President Obama’s team said they would ‘kill Romney,’ and, just last week, David Axelrod referred to individuals opposing the president as ‘contract killers.’ It’s clear President Obama’s team is running a campaign of character assassination. We repudiate any efforts on our side to do so.

Romney himself makes a similar attempt to turn the tables, spoiling a perfectly honorable rejection of Ricketts’ tactics — “I want to make it very clear, I repudiate that effort. I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign” by adding, “I’ve been disappointed in the president’s campaign to date, which has been focused on character assassination.”

Joe Ricketts (image: Nati Harnik/AP)

Maybe that’s because the candidate’s own invective really isn’t all that different from the incendiary claims made in the Ricketts proposal. The ad’s narrator asks, “How can our president stand up for America when he’s bowing, begging, kneeling and apologizing for America?” Romney himself regularly (and falsely) accuses Obama of apologizing for America, and one of Newt Gingrich’s signature lines during the primary race was his insistence that “no future president will ever again bow to a Saudi king.” And just as the Ricketts ad slams Obama for getting “caught red-handed caving to the Russians,” Romney says that “The idea that our president is planning on doing something with them that he’s not willing to tell the American people before the election is something I find very, very alarming.” The ad insists that Obama “was taught for years that America was the problem,” while Romney proclaims that “our president doesn’t have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do.”

Instead of plainly stating that the words of Obama’s former pastor are irrelevant and off-limits, Romney chooses to stand by an earlier statement, made to Sean Hannity of Fox News (who has said things about Obama nearly as risible as anything in the Ricketts ad), that called into question Obama’s Christianity. The real kicker? Romney manages to reinforce his reputation for taking so many varying stances that he can’t keep them all straight: “I stand by what I said, whatever it was.” To refresh his memory, “what I said” happened to be a discussion of the very topic — Rev. Wright — that he had just repudiated:

For the president not to understand that a wide array of religions and a conviction that Judeo-Christian philosophy is an integral part of our foundation is really an extraordinary thing. I think again that the president takes his philosophical leanings in this regard, not from those who are ardent believers in various faiths but instead from those who would like America to be more secular. And I’m not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation.

Obama, for the record, never claimed that the United States should be more secular; nor did he say that it should be a “less Christian” nation. He did warn against sectarianism, and he did emphasize that “given the increasing diversity of America’s populations . . . . we are no longer a Christian nation” — i.e. Christianity is no longer the only American religion. These distinctions are lost on Romney. If the left took as much license with Romney’s remarks as Romney takes with the president’s, Priorities USA would be running ads with lines like, “Romney says U.S. should be a Judeo-Christian theocracy!”

Mitt Romney is the king of missed opportunities. When he has a chance to distance himself from the vitriolic language of his party, he demurs. When he speaks at Liberty University, whose founder John McCain famously denounced as an “agent of intolerance,” he offers bromides about shared faith, declining to challenge the rhetoric that demonizes not only the non-religious but Romney’s own Mormon religion. And true to his nature, when Romney has the opportunity to break with the sort of people who not-so-subtly emphasize the president’s middle name (Hussein! Just like Saddam!), he shies from it. Apparently it is too much to ask for the man auditioning for the highest office in the land show some backbone by distancing himself from what Greg Sargent describes as “all the marginally more ‘acceptable’ ways that leading GOP officials and opinionmakers continue to feed a deeply paranoid view of Obama as someone who doesn’t really wish the country well and harbors secret hostility towards your patriotism and religious faith and values.”

The Obama campaign issued its own broadside on character assassination, telling reporters that, “[t]oday, Mitt Romney had the opportunity to distance himself from his previous attempts to inject the divisive politics of character assassination into the presidential race. It was a moment that required moral leadership, and once again he didn’t rise to the occasion.” At the Washington Monthly, Ed Kilgore offers a more analytical take on Romney’s failure of leadership, musing that, while his campaign realizes the necessity of appeasing the GOP base with red meat about Obama’s socialist leanings and connections to Saul Alinsky-type radicals, it also cannot afford to alienate crucial independent voters. “Romney and company want the crazy stuff to get out there as much as possible without being responsible for it,” Kilgore writes, then predicts the mildness of the rebukes from Boston will do little to quash the efforts of overeager, super PAC-armed billionaires like Ricketts. “It will happen again and again.”

Chicago’s Ricketts-owned Wrigley Field

Despite the serious implications of such scorched-earth tactics, Ricketts’ arrival on the political scene at least provides an element of black humor. His super PAC, which ran $600,000 worth of ads against Harry Reid in the 2010 Nevada Senate race, is called the Ending Spending Action Fund. Funny that an outfit dedicated to ending spending sees nothing ironic about issuing a statement like this one: “Joe Ricketts is prepared to spend significant resources in the 2012 election in both the presidential race and Congressional races.” Yes, in the quest to end spending, Ricketts recently dropped a cool $200,000 into the Nebraska Republican primary. Ricketts is appalled to see his tax dollars lavished on food stamps for welfare queens or tossed down the rathole of educating the next generation, but he’s perfectly fine with sinking money into TV ads that question the character of insufficiently conservative Republicans.

The hypocrisy extends to Ricketts’ business dealings. Ricketts, along with his children, has 95 percent ownership of the Chicago Cubs, and the AP reports that, “despite his limited government philosophy, the ball club is pressing for $200 million in state-backed bonds to renovate Wrigley Field, the Cubs stadium also owned by the family.” The patriarch’s political activism may come back to haunt him, however, as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel — who formerly served as Obama’s chief of staff — is said to be “livid” about Ricketts’ “blatant hypocrisy” and willingness to fund the sort of “racially motivated ads that are insulting to the president and the presidential campaign.” Oops. Live by the sword, die by the sword, I guess.

Ricketts shows no shame in asking for government handouts when it benefits his pocketbook. Tim Murphy of Mother Jones points to a CBS Chicago report from April that revealed the billionaire was urging Emanuel to devote money from the city’s amusement tax to improving Cubs property:

The Cubs want to use $200 million in public funds to construct the long-planned Triangle Building along Clark Street in front of the ballpark. The Triangle Building would house team offices, a restaurant and parking, and would feature a Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame, a Cubs Pro Shop, and new ticket windows.

Murphy notes acidly that, “in fairness, ‘End the Spending—But Only When That Money is Being Spent on Other People’ would be a terrible name for a super-PAC.”

True. But really, once you’ve solicited an ad proposal that uses CGI technology to shrink President Obama into a midget — “as he walks toward us, however, the cockiness lessens and he literally gets shorter and shorter, ending up just 2-3 feet tall as he walks past camera on the left” — terrible becomes a pretty relative term.