Long story short, Barack Obama's campaign created an ad questioning whether Mitt Romney would have ordered the raid that killed bin Laden. Conservatives criticized the notion and the ad.
Today we see even the pro-Obama, far left liberal, (for now) Arianna Huffington is saying Obama's ad "is one of the most despicable things you can do..."
Full exchange below.
[WATCH]
The full exchange:
HUFFINGTON: I agree completely — I agree with the Romney campaign. I think that using the Osama bin Laden assassination, killing the great news that we had a year ago in order to say basically that Obama did it and Romney might not have done it, which is the message. … I don’t think there should be an ad about that. … [T]o turn it into a campaign ad is one of the most despicable things you can do. It’s the same thing that Hillary Clinton did with the 3 a.m. call. You know, you are not ready to be commander-in-chief. [...]
HOST: In a campaign aren’t you supposed to tout the accomplishments of what you’ve done?
HUFFINGTON: But this is not just what this ad did, does. What the ad does is questions, if we’re talking about the same ad. … It quotes a snippet from Romney in ’07 and uses that to imply that Romney would not have been decisive. There’s no way to know whether Romney would have been as decisive. And to actually speculate that he wouldn’t be is to me not the way to run campaigns on either side.
Obama's 2008 campaign spokesman actually agrees with Huffington, or so he said in 2008. Flashback via ABC News:
The Obama campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, accused the Clinton team of playing “the politics of fear” just like George W. Bush.
Burton, now the head of the Democratic super PAC, Priorities USA, said at the time: “When Senator Clinton voted with President Bush to authorize the war in Iraq, she made a tragically bad decision that diverted our military from the terrorists who attacked us, and allowed Osama bin Laden to escape and regenerate his terrorist network. It’s ironic that she would borrow the President’s tactics in her own campaign and invoke bin Laden to score political points. We already have a President who plays the politics of fear, and we don’t need another.
In the meantime, Mitt Romney gets the quote of the day.
Mitt Romney, asked if he would have given the order to go after Osama Bin Laden, as President Obama's new video and his campaign aides have suggested he wouldn't have done, per POLITICO's Ginger Gibson: "Of course, even Jimmy Carter would have given that order."
Related:
Obama Spikes The bin Laden Football Too Early In Campaign