Ad About Woman’s Death Causes Campaign Furor
Mitt Romney’s campaign fiercely protested a searing attack ad aired by allies of President Barack Obama on Wednesday, but drew expressions of dismay from conservatives when an aide to the former Massachusetts governor invoked the benefits of a state health care system he signed into law.
“If people had been in Massachusetts under Gov. Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” spokeswoman Andrea Saul said in an interview on Fox News. The Republican presidential candidate himself rarely mentions the law, which contains a requirement to purchase health coverage similar to the one in the federal law that conservatives despise and he has vowed to repeal.
Saul volunteered her observation after sharply denouncing the ad. In it, which a grim-faced former steelworker, Joe Soptic, suggests that Romney and Bain Capital, the private equity firm he founded, might bear some responsibility for his wife’s death from cancer several years ago.
“It’s just despicable, to be honest,” Saul said of the commercial, which is aired by Priorities USA Action, a super PAC that supports Obama’s re-election. “Of course he doesn’t want to see ill come to anyone.”
Independent fact checkers judged the commercial harshly, sometimes unusually so.