VIDEO: Romney ad opens campaign to backlash, expert says

“if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

With those words, Mitt Romney launches an ad campaign against President Obama. In the already famous ad, Romney uses video of Obama saying “if we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”

What the ad doesn’t tell you is that when Obama said those words he was quoting the John McCain campaign. Romney’s camp says there is nothing unfair about the ad.

With that in mind, ThinkProgress has created its own ad, call it a riff on Romney saying very similar things, no doubt while purporting to quote Obama or Democrats, but they leave that context out, just as Romney left it out of his ad.

“You’ve heard the old saying, ‘all is fair in love and campaigns,'” said Metro State political science professor Norman Provizer.

“People who campaign for office will use whatever they can against an opponent, and it is up to the people to judge the fairness of it. This ad doesn’t surprise me. The problem is that it can come back and bite you when people say this just proves that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. If you do those things you have to be careful to do them in a way that benefits you and doesn’t come back on you,” Provizer told The Colorado Independent.

Romney’s ad is below, followed by the ThinkProgress spoof.

Scot Kersgaard has been managing editor of a political newspaper, editor and co-owner of a ski town newspaper, executive editor of eight high-tech magazines (where he worked with current Apple CEO Tim Cook), deputy press secretary to a U.S. Senator, and an outdoors columnist at the Rocky Mountain News. He has an English degree from the University of Washington. He was awarded a fellowship to study internet journalism at the University of Maryland's Knight Center for Specialized Journalism. He was student body president in college. He spends his free time hiking and skiing.

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