The Romney Tape -- The Reason for the Timing

Last night, the media made a big splash about a tape on which Mitt Romney told a fund raiser last May that president Obama has the support of most of the 47% of the population that depend on the government. Romney pointed out the culture of dependence that this creates and spoke about rallying the rest of the country to move forward with programs that favor independence for individuals and the benefit of work. There is no point in hashing out exactly what Romney said; it is much the same as he says in his stump speech. I think he usually puts it this way: "If you want to go through life dependent on the government for your existence and are satisfied with that kind of existence, then you should vote for the other guy."

When I first saw the big deal being made about the tape, I began to wonder why it had come out now. After all, this tape is from last May; surely, it did not just surface now. I found out that parts of the tape have been on youtube for months. Further, about three weeks ago, the whole thing was being discussed on Twitter. So why the big media splash now?

This afternoon comes the answer: Today's Gallup tracking poll of registered voters shows Obama leading Romney by 47% to 46%. That poll covers seven days. Over the last week or so, the Obama lead in this same poll has declined from 8% to 7% to 6% to 5% to 4% to 3% to 3% again and now to 1%. If you do the math, what this means is that yesterday's polling had Romney doing roughly 14% better than he did a week ago and Obama doing roughly 14% worse than he did at that same time. It seems that not only has the Democrats convention bounce disappeared, but also the total failure by Obama to protect our embassy in Benghazi even after being warned that an attack was coming has undermined his support. Obama even made things worse when he ignored the attack that was underway and flew off to a fund raiser in Vegas. Add in the snub to the Israeli Prime Minister due supposedly to scheduling problems during a time when Obama found time to go on the Letterman show and attend a party thrown by Jay-Z and Beyonce, and Obama has been shown not to care. Even the lies trotted out by the Obamacrats that none of the events in the Middle East had anything to do with America or Obama's policies has not helped. No one would even believe such garbage. Obama was bleeding in the polls.

That means only one thing: the tape of Romney and the big media splash is an attempt by the Obamacrats and their allies in the media to change the subject. They are desparate not to talk about the attack in Libya anymore. So they trot out a tape that has been around for a while but get the media to treat it as big news.

We shall have to see if it works. My bet is that it will not.