The shout from the crowd was clear. As President Barack Obama gave the first official campaign speech of his re-election bid at a sports arena in Ohio last weekend the first mention of his Republican opponent Mitt Romney prompted a male voice in the throng to yell: “Traitor!”
Earlier in the rally, held in the Ohio state capital of Columbus, several warm-up speakers for Obama had derided and mocked Romney for once using a Swiss bank account. Campaign videos played to the audience had prompted loud boos when Romney appeared or was mentioned…
“People look at Romney, and he is the personification of everything that is wrong with the system,” said Justin Ruben, executive director of MoveOn.org, a web-based group that campaigns on progressive causes. Ruben said the group had recently taken an internal poll of its left-wing members and been surprised that 68% of them felt Romney was as bad as or worse than President George W Bush as an American politician. “That was striking. I was not sure that our members had a scale that went beyond Bush,” Ruben said.
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