Republic of "Be Not Afraid"

Bill Burton runs the SuperPac Priorities USA in support of the Obama re-election team at Chicago, OFA; and Mr. Burton chooses to use a sympathetic personality from earlier videos about Bain, Joe Soptic, in order to state baldly (below) that Mitt Romney is responsible for the death by cancer of Soptic’s wife.  Rough stuff.  The facts do not suit the narrative, as Mrs. Soptic is reported to have had her own health care, and it is also reported that her sudden death came more than five years after the plant closing -- long after Joe Soptic was working a new job.  The measure of this video is that it is a distortion of the facts in order to smear Mr. Romney as cruel to a dying woman.  Does anyone think it is real?  Doesn’t signify.  OFA means to heap calumny on Mitt Romney all the way to Election Day.  Romney is a godless plutocrat who kills women with cancer and steals your jobs for his foreign partners.  OFA remakes America into the Republic of Fear.  Candidate Obama preaches fear in each instance when he speaks of the election.  OFA aims to convince its supporters that a Romney presidency is the worst possible fear.  History says that a campaign based on fear of the other (e.g., Romney the Mormon) is a campaign that is vulnerable to the courage of convictions of the opponent and his or her supporters.

Romney Campaign Answers the Fear.

The Romney camp issues a video (above) based upon the recent Romney visit to Poland.  It features the Romney quote in praise of Pope John Paul II’s (Cardinal Karol Wojtyla) resistance to the Soviet gangsters, “Be not afraid.”  The video then takes the dramatic turn to argue that Candidate Obama is making a “war on religion” with his non-congressional mandate that the ACA obliges all religious institutions regardless of confession to offer contraception and sterilization services to the workforce.  This is the basis for the lawsuit against ACA by the American bishops and many distinguished Roman Catholic landmarks such as the University of Notre Dame.   It is rough stuff, answering the OFA Republic of Fear with the pointed “Be not afraid.”