UPDATED (Twice): We’ve Been Watching American Politics For A Lot Of Years…

…and this is probably the most disgusting campaign spot we’ve ever seen.

Not only is this a cheap shot – whatever plant Mitt Romney closed as Bain Capital decided to cut its losses was destined to close regardless of who was running it because it was losing money – it belies a contempt of the market which in better times would be drummed out of the political mainstream.

Businesses don’t exist to provide jobs. Businesses exist to make money. By pursuing profits businesses act to insure their survival, because profits are sustainable and losses are not.

Factories which make a profit don’t get closed down. Or, to put a finer point on this, factories which make a profit which is market-competitive don’t get closed down. The one this poor guy worked in wasn’t market-competitive. If it was, Bain Capital wouldn’t have shuttered it – hell, the company which had it before Bain Capital would likely have been too strong for Bain to even buy in.

But none of this matters to the Obamites. To them the pursuit of profit is evil unless you can function as an agent of their social engineering and a provider of jobs they can take credit for in an industry they favor. And so Romney, as a man who made a fortune in business, must be destroyed.

The ad above is part of a conscious effort in swing states that Obama is making to demonize Romney as a rich guy who screws the regular guy. It’s an effort to so poison the well with working-class white voters that they’ll be too disgusted with both parties to even go vote. BuzzFeed’s John Ellis describes the situation thusly…

The 2012 president election, boiled down to its remaining variables, is about two things: (1) white voters who voted for Barack Obama last time and have since grown disillusioned and, (2) white voters who stayed home in 2008 rather than vote for John McCain but may vote this time. The Obama campaign’s goal is to make both groups stay home rather than vote. It’s not a “negative campaign” they’re running. It’s purposefully toxic.

Italics ours. All this is of a piece with the rest of Obama’s campaign. The newest push – Romney Hood. Because cutting tax rates by 20 percent across the board is robbing the poor to give to the rich, y’know. How does that work? Well, when half the population pays no income taxes and actually feeds at the trough, a tax cut means there’s less at the trough for them to sop up – and so letting taxpayers keep their own money is stealing from the poor.

That’s what’s in the White House right now.

Ross Douthat notes that this ain’t 2008

There’s nothing particularly unusual about this kind of strategy, and Obama would hardly be the first politician to turn disillusionment to his advantage. Still, it says something about how far we’ve come from “hope and change” that the president’s re-election hopes may depend on making a struggling, disaffected and perpetually-disappointed bloc of American voters even more disaffected than ever.

Over at Ace Of Spades, they’re beating the drums…

Ok Romney Death Star, you were able to destroy Gingrich, Santorum, Perry et al. Let’s see you take on this Son of Bitch.

War.

Added: Seems an ad featuring the Terry family informing people that Obama killed an American Law Enforcement officer (and 300 or so Mexicans) is in order.

Actually, what Romney’s shock-and-awe comeback to this ad ought to be is that Obama screwed over 20,000 Delphi retirees by denying them pensions, and then lied about it, as a sop to his union pals…

Emails obtained by The Daily Caller show that the U.S. Treasury Department, led by Timothy Geithner, was the driving force behind terminating the pensions of 20,000 salaried retirees at the Delphi auto parts manufacturing company.

The move, made in 2009 while the Obama administration implemented its auto bailout plan, appears to have been made solely because those retirees were not members of labor unions.

The internal government emails contradict sworn testimony, in federal court and before Congress, given by several Obama administration figures. They also indicate that the administration misled lawmakers and the courts about the sequence of events surrounding the termination of those non-union pensions, and that administration figures violated federal law.

Delphi, a General Motors company, is one of the world’s largest automotive parts manufacturers. Twenty thousand of its workers lost nearly their entire pensions when the government bailed out GM. At the same time, Delphi employees who were members of the United Auto Workers union saw their pensions topped off and made whole.

Surely the Romney camp can find some old guys with oxygen tubes in their noses who can talk about having to eat cat food because of Obama, no?

At this point, the rules of political decency have to go out the window. Romney is now where John McCain should have been in 2008 – he has to recognize that America can’t afford him to lose and he has to do whatever it takes to get Obama out of office. If that means descending into the gutter, so be it. Obama is already there. Obama has been there since George Soros put him up to running for president in the first place. McCain, who will go down as one of the most dangerously incompetent politicians in modern American political history, refused to do what was necessary to win. So far, Romney appears to be made of tougher stuff – but he’s going to have to show it.

An ad like this one and Obama’s latest class-warfare demagoguery can’t go unanswered. Romney might not need to respond this week, but he’s got to respond. And he’ll need a level of viciousness which doubles as performance art if he wants to beat these Chicago scumbags at their own game.

UPDATE: And naturally, the ad itself is horrendously dishonest as to its facts

The pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action lobbed a heavy-duty attack at Mitt Romney this morning, airing an ad that links the closure of a GST Steel plant in Kansas City to the loss of a family’s health insurance — and the death of a woman some time later.

The man speaking in the ad, Joe Soptic, says, “Mitt Romney and Bain closed the plant, I lost my health care and my family lost their health care. And a short time after that my wife became ill.” Soptic explains he’s not exactly sure when his wife became sick, but that when he took her to the hospital she had undetected, advanced cancer and died 22 days later.

The Romney campaign has pushed back on other GST Steel-related attacks by arguing that the plant in Kansas City closed after he stepped away from his management job at Bain. (Democrats counter that Romney was still listed as a top executive at Bain through 2002, and that he built up the private equity firm during the time it invested in GST Steel.)

In the case of this particularly jarring super PAC ad, it may also be relevant that Soptic’s wife died in 2006, years after the GST factory closed down.

A 2006 story in the Kansas City Star reported the death of Ranae Soptic, a former champion roller skater: “Soptic went to the hospital for pneumonia, but doctors found signs of very advanced cancer, and she died two weeks later on June 22.”

I asked Priorities USA strategist Bill Burton to explain the connection between Romney, Bain and a cancer fatality that happened near the end of Romney’s tenure as governor of Massachusetts. The lapse in time between the plant closing and Soptic’s death doesn’t mean the ad is invalid, but it raises questions about the cause and effect relationship here.

“We’re illustrating how long it took for communities and individuals to recover from the closing of these businesses,” Burton responded. “Families and individuals had to find new jobs, new sources of health insurance and a way to make up for the pensions they lost. Mitt Romney has had an enduring impact on the lives of thousands of men and women and for many of them, that impact has been devastating.”

UPDATE #2: It’s even worse than that. The wife was working when Soptic lost his job and she had insurance at the time.

When you’ve lost Wolf Blitzer, you’ve lost everything. This is officially an epic failure.

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