How do you know when a campaign season has gone from bad to worse? When campaigns start twisting things to the point of making their opponents appear to be monsters. A robocall used by the Gingrich campaign in Florida has done just that.
COMMENTARY | This is the subterranean, reprehensible level to which the Republican presidential race has sunk: A robocall disseminated to Florida voters suggests that Mitt Romney, while governor of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, forced senior citizen Holocaust survivors to eat non-kosher food for the first time in their lives because he vetoed a bill providing for appropriations for state-run nursing homes.
The message, obtained by anti-robocall activist Shaun Dakin, announces in part, "Mitt Romney vetoed a bill paying for kosher food for our seniors in nursing homes. Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher. Where is Mitt Romney's compassion...?"
The robocall signed off as being paid for by "Newt 2012," candidate Newt Gingrich's campaign. If the robocall is truly theirs, it is beyond atrocious.
If the statements were true, such an act by Romney would have been monstrous, a direct infringement on those elderly Jews' religion and lifestyle (addressed when the robocall directs the listener to "end Mitt Romney's hypocrisy on religious freedom"). However, they are not true, making the robocall even more insulting.
Although it is true that Romney vetoed a 2003 bill that would have ended on-site cooked kosher food in nursing homes in Massachusetts, according to Commentary magazine, it also provided for the kosher meals to be trucked in from outside vendors. The senior citizens would have never been "forced" to eat non-kosher food. Besides, the veto was overridden.
The robocall thus becomes a conglomeration of misleading information, a shameless series of lies and mischaracterizations. By questioning Romney's compassion and making him appear to be anti-Semitic and cheap ($5 a meal is "too much to pay for our grandparents"), it suggests that Romney, a multi-millionaire, is a callous politician, inconsiderate not only of the welfare of individuals but a segment of society's most helpless.
By invoking the Holocaust, though, the contemptible robocall entered into even more shameful territory by playing on the ignorance of the callers and the emotional and historical repugnance of the Hitlerian genocide, not to mention the protective veneration showed those that survived those horrific times.
All to sway a few votes in the Florida Primary...
The robocall, an automated political calling tactic using pre-recording messages, has long been used to present oppositional, often misleading information. The George W. Bush campaign used robocalling in the 2000 campaign. Some analysts and historians believe that such robocalls effectively derailed Sen. John McCain's momentum going into the South Carolina Primary by using misleading information that played upon deep-seated prejudices. According to the New York Times, one call in particular insinuated that Sen. McCain's daughter, adopted from an orphanage in Bangladesh, was of mixed racial parentage and McCain's actual daughter born out of wedlock.
McCain lost South Carolina and ultimately the 2000 nomination.
In an odd twist, McCain would hire the same firm that did such damage to his 2000 campaign to aid his 2008 campaign. The result: A scandal, according to American Chronicle, involving robocalls that stated that then Sen. Obama had associated with terrorists that had killed Americans.
All for a few extra votes...
When asked about the robocall, CNN reported Gingrich denied knowing anything about it.
(photo credit: Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons)
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