Is it unprecedented? And does it provoke symmetrical outrage?
The president’s allies maintain that the Romney campaign has engaged in a particularly underhanded tactic by quoting the president quoting a McCain campaign aide. This is not an entirely unreasonable view. A good way for the president to seize the moral high ground would be for him to apologize to Rush Limbaugh, John McCain, and to voters who may have seen his 2008 Spanish-language campaign advertisements. And the Romney campaign, in the same spirit, should cut a new ad specifying that the president was quoting a McCain advertisement, and then pivoting to news coverage from outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Politico, as well as political analysts at center-left think tanks, who’ve reported that the president’s campaign team intends to shift the conversation away from the deteriorating state of the economy to other issues and tactics, e.g., polarizing cultural questions and base-energizing attacks on private equity investors, etc.