Bumped—Kaili Joy Gray
Republican U.S. presidential candidate Mitt Romney is seen in a tele prompter reflection waiting to speak to supporters at the Chillicothe Victory rally in Chillicothe, Ohio August 14, 2012.
Earlier this evening in Chillicothe, Ohio, Mitt Romney
accused President Obama of running a campaign of "hate," saying the president is a "disgrace" to the White House.
Mitt Romney leveled his harshest criticism of President Obama's reelection campaign to date in Ohio Tuesday, declaring that Obama should "take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago." [...]
Referring to Joe Biden's comment that Romney and Republicans would let big business put Americans "back in chains" Romney said Obama's "campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the presidency. Another outrageous charge just came a few hours ago in Virginia."
"This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like," Romney said.
The Obama campaign's response—an emailed statement from Press Secretary Ben LaBolt—was simple and to the point:
Governor Romney's comments tonight seemed unhinged, and particularly strange coming at a time when he's pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false.
I haven't seen video yet of Romney's speech, but based on the quotes in the report above, "unhinged" seems like the perfect word to describe Romney's behavior. And it also seems like the kind of word that could stick to Romney for the rest of the campaign.
8:43 PM PT: Here's video of Romney's remarks. Definitely unhinged. And the amazing thing is that he actually was speaking from a teleprompter, so his comments weren't an accident.
