Fake Republicans for Obama

Powerline exposes the latest iteration of a stupid old Democratic trick:

It happens all the time in talk radio: a caller will say that he is a lifelong Republican, and will recall fondly how he voted for Ronald Reagan. Then he says that today’s Republicans have gone too far, and for the first time ever he is voting for a Democrat! These callers are nearly always lying. If you look them up, you likely will find that they are Democratic Party precinct chairmen.

The Obama campaign is trying to perpetrate the same deception. It has just released a video called Republican Women For Obama, which features four or five women who claim to be Republicans, or to have been Republicans until recently. But, of course, they are appalled by Mitt Romney–it is hard to say why, apart from a couple of discreet references to abortion, but did they really just now figure out that the Republican Party is pro-life? The ad is surprisingly ineffective, but it is also dishonest. At least one of the women who pose as “Republican women for Obama” is a long-time Democrat.

Her name is Maria Ciano, and BuzzFeed finds that she has been a registered Democrat in Colorado at least since 2006.

Of course, there is an easier way of knowing that the woman isn’t a Republican than combing through her Facebook page and voter registration. First, she is an unmarried Hispanic woman. Second, one has to be a pretty extreme Democrat to be appalled by Mitt Romney’s “right-wing” ways.

UPDATE: Obama is clearly getting desperate. President Barack Obama said Mitt Romney has locked himself into “extreme positions” on economic and social issues and would surely impose them if elected, trying to discredit his Republican rival at the biggest political moment of his life.

Romney is a flip-flopper, not an extremist, and everyone knows it. Obama’s 2012 campaign is looking more hapless than Hillary Clinton’s catastrophic 2008 team.