Romney aide admits new low

I quote from "Romney Camp Bets On Welfare Attack" by Ben Smith on Buzzfeed:

"Our most effective ad is our welfare ad," a top television advertising strategist for Romney, Ashley O'Connor, said at a forum Tuesday hosted by ABCNews and Yahoo! News. "It's new information." 

The welfare ad has been the center of intense dispute, with Democrats accusing Romney of unearthing old racial ghosts and Romney pointing out that the Obama Administration has offered states waivers that could, in fact, lighten work requirements in welfare, a central issue in Bill Clinton's 1996 revamping of public assistance. 

The Washington Post's "Fact Checker" awarded Romney's ad "four Pinocchios," a measure Romney pollster Neil Newhouse dismissed. 

"Fact checkers come to this with their own sets of thoughts and beliefs, and we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact checkers," he said. The fact-checkers — whose institutional rise has been a feature of the cycle — have "jumped the shark," he added after the panel.

Presumably the Romney campaign is not going to limit its campaign adds to things that they feel that they can defend as true.

The theme of this blog is Knowledge for Development. You should not be surprised that I find the comment above as the antithesis of the blog's purpose.

Note: Jump the shark:

a term to describe a moment when somethin that was once great has reached a point where it will now decline in quality and popularity. 

Origin of this phrase comes from a Happy Days episode where the Fonz jumped a shark on waterskis. Thus was labeled the lowest point of the show.