Former Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and candidate to the Republican presidential nomination of 2008, had the unfortunate luck of having his strategy leaked to the Boston Globe this week. How does Mitt Romney plan to discredit Hillary Clinton? By – (I kid you not) – making her sound French.

Mind you, Republicans had some measured success with making Kerry “look French” during the last election. So why not capitalize on Anti-French sentiment for the 2008 bid? These deplorable tactics are stale, childish and just plain wrong. But we are not the only ones ridiculing this approach. Despite the smirks, laughs and guffaws about the French on the Chris Matthews’ show – wink wink nudge nudge – the pundits themselves ridiculed the strategy. Is this the end of viable French-Bashing for political strategists?

Your thoughts…

Transcript from Hardball with Chris Matthews re: Mitt Romney

MATTHEWS: First of all, it turns out that Mitt Romney today has had a memo released to the public—not of his own volition. And one of the things they’re going to do is try to turn Hillary into French.
HILARY ROSEN, DEMOCRATIC STRATEGIST, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: It’s too—it’s too crude to be serious. It’s laughable. I think…
MATTHEWS: Well, what are they thinking about, this ridiculous French fries thing we went through a couple years ago—are we going that way again? (…)
MATTHEWS: We should all have that problem. And then the other thing is he’s going to try to make Hillary look like she’s part of the Europe deterioration of America. In fact, there’s one line where it says, Hillary equals…
ROSEN: Equals French. Right.
MATTHEWS: … French.(LAUGHTER)
MATTHEWS: Does this stuff work, this dog whistle stuff?
DAVIS: Well, what I don’t understand is why we’re even talking about it.
MATTHEWS: OK…(CROSSTALK)DAVIS: I mean, it’s a memo.
MATTHEWS: … in the hopes that Romney will never do that,

Source:

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