Republicans debuted a new ad Thursday in which a frustrated former Obama supporter expresses her disappointment with the president. The only problem: The woman in the video is actually an RNC staffer.
The new ad features Republican National Committee Director of Hispanic Outreach Bettina Inclan, who in the ad purports to be an average woman voter who supported Obama in 2008. She describes her disillusionment with the president in the ad as a romantic relationship gone awry.
“You’re just not he person I thought you were,” Inclan says in the ad, addressing a cardboard cutout of Obama. Inclan lists out-of-control spending and Obama’s penchant for hanging out with Hollywood celebrities as reasons for the break-up. “It’s not me, it’s you. I think we should just be friends.”
The ad asks people to share why they’re “breaking up” with Obama.
This is just boneheaded. Let’s face it, Pres. Obama isn’t going to get the same share of the vote he got in 2008. And simple math dictates that this means it shouldn’t be so awfully hard to dig up an actual disillusioned Obama voter. There are plenty out there. Yet the Republican Party didn’t even try to find one. Instead, they grabbed some GOP functionary and got her to lie about being an Obama supporter.
As a result, they’ve generated an easily avoidable headline. Maybe lying has become so familiar to Republicans that, given a choice between a lie and honesty, they’ve actually come to prefer lying. Whatever the reason, this is stupid.
