When Joe Biden tells a crowd that Romney’s going to “put y’all back in chains” over banking regulation, I think everyone “gets” the metaphor. But Willard Romney took that pretty personally — almost as if putting people in chains was a secret fantasy he’d been called out on.
The quote: “Look at what they value and look at their budget, and what they’re proposing. Romney wants to let the — he said in the first 100 days, he’s going to let the big banks once again write their own rules. Unchain Wall Street. They’re going to put y’all back in chains.” — VP Joe Biden, yesterday in Virginia
Raw Story: A furious Romney fired back at a rally in Ohio, accusing Obama, who ran in 2008 vowing to heal political divides, of trying to “smash America apart” to cobble together a 51 percent majority to win a second term. “This is what an angry and desperate presidency looks like,” he said, in the most charged exchanges of the campaign so far. “Mr President, take your campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago and let us get about rebuilding and reuniting America,” the Republican candidate said.
[...] “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,” Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt said.
Because Romney became unhinged over Biden’s metaphor, the news media must either give Mitt a belly rub or chase down an explanation:
USA Today: Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, said Biden was referencing comments by leading Republicans who say they support “unshackling” the private sector from regulation. “The Vice President has often used a similar metaphor to describe the need to ‘unshackle’ the middle class,” Cutter said. “Today’s comments were a derivative of those remarks, describing the devastating impact letting Wall Street write its own rules again would have on middle class families.” Earlier this year, Biden said, “the last time we unshackled Wall Street, America’s middle class was shackled.”
As if we didn’t already know that.
More importantly: that took some heat off Romney’s tax returns for one day at least, didn’t it?
