Woes the GOP. Despite standing on rooftops and screaming Solyndra repeatedly for the past eighteen months, still nobody seems to care.
Yet, there the word is, the first to pop up on Mitt Romney's newest Obama Isn't Working ad, in big scary typeface:
Solyndra was a green energy company that took government money and lost it. For reasons that remain partially unexplained, the right equates green energy programs with a scam, and Solyndra seemed to prove that. As Solyndra was a giant hole the government poured taxpayer dollars into, the logic goes, so are all green energy programs, diverting time and energy we could be using to drill, baby, drill.
Romney's new ad goes after Obama on his green energy investment, taking him to task for the flagging solar industry and lost jobs. This is the least effective part of the ad; if Romney wants to talk about businesses that lost jobs, the Obama administration would be happy to email everyone in the world a list of jobs lost under Bain Capital's various ventures.
The ad works best when suggesting impropriety on Obama's part, such as linking the failed businesses in which the government invested to big Obama donors. But that the ad is unable to actually name any donors suggests that the links are tenuous at best; the best the ad can do is dangle the words "big Democrat donors" and "friends and family."
In fact, the ad is so specific when it comes to the amount of money loaned out to the companies and then lost—in other words, all the figures on public record—that it draws suspicion to the amount of information on which the ad is vague. When the ad claims workers were laid off at these jobs, how many were they? Two? 2,000? 20,000? The ad claims at one point that a business in which the government invested is under investigation. For what? Anything to do with their handling of the government's money? If it was, I'd bet we'd hear about it; that we don't hear the reason suggests the business is under investigation for something unrelated. And again, who are these big donors that supposedly benefited from green energy contracts?
This may be one of the reasons the Solyndra scandal just isn't penetrating the public consciousness. Romney is hardly the first to run an ad about the salacious company—Americans for Prosperity did so last November. The result? Nothing. The number of people who have even heard of Solyndra is down near the number who think Harry Reid is Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, polling for green energy remains high.
Romney would love to turn green energy investment into an economic issue, but again, raising the specter of lost jobs raises the specter of Bain Capital; Obama's reelection campaign has plenty more footage of laid off steel workers from GS Industries where their last ads came from. The right would also love for Solyndra to finally become a scandal, with Darrell Issa-issued subpoenas and public hearings and the rest. That doesn't seem to be happening. The most Romney can hope for at this point is that the ominous music and grainy footage and scary typeface of the ad lingers in the back of independent voters' minds, attaching an aura of failure to Obama that they can no more explain than they can name exactly what it is about green energy that's supposed to be so bad in the first place.
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