With the campaign drawing to a close, Governor Romney and President Obama scramble for votes in the key battleground state of Ohio. Obama is winning, but not by much. According to a poll on CNN, Obama has the approval of 50 percent of voters in Ohio, while Romney follows close by with a 46 percent- a mere 4 percent difference. Although the difference is within the poll's sampling error of plus and minus 3.5 percent, the close difference between Obama and Romney shows the closeness of the battle for Ohio's important 18 electoral votes. With the added stress of having the race in Ohio drawing to a close and Romney and Obama being neck and neck in the race, Romney has resorted to controversial and questionable methods to gain votes from the Ohioans.Romney recently released an ad that deliberately warps history and news to fit its purpose. Using clever wording, it uses actual facts to mislead viewers in an attempt to sway them to his side. The ad starts by attacking Obama, saying that he had caused GM and Chrysler to become bankrupt. This is true; however, Romney's plan also included doing the same. The only difference between the two candidates plans is that Obama wanted the government to help the major car companies through bankruptcy by giving loans to them while Romney wanted the private sector to help. Another fact that Romney "bends" and uses to attack Obama is that Obama sold Chrysler to Italians, who will then start building Jeeps in China. This is also true, but to a certain degree. Obama did sell Chrysler to Fiat, who is now building Jeeps in China, but the Italian manufacturer is not actually taking away jobs in the US and moving them to China as the ad suggests; the company is simply expanding existing operations in China for the purpose of building Jeeps. In addition, the ad cited Detroit News' endorsement of Romney, even though the organization pointed out that Romney had the wrong idea about the auto bailout.
Romney is not the only one to use questionable methods to garner votes from a group of people. Obama used scare tactics to win back the support of women when Obama's lead on women sank to only 3 points away from Romney. However, Romney is taking a huge risk by running misleading ads during the final days of the campaign to get a few more votes, especially when the information presented by the article is blatantly twisting the facts.
1 comment:
The sad thing about these negative attack ads are that they are probably very effective. This late in the campaign, the undecided voters are mostly those who are not extremely informed on politics to begin with, and therefore are more susceptible to spin.
I remember reading somewhere that Ohio has voted for the winning presidential candidate 27 times out of the last 29 elections. Not only are they a swing state, Ohio's uncanny ability to cast votes for the victor makes the candidates even more motivated to win the state.
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