“I’ve been disappointed with the president’s campaign to date which is focused on character assassination. I just think were wiser to talk about the issues of the day, what we do to get America working again, and talking about our respective records,” said former governor Mitt Romney, when he repudiated the possibility of running an attack ad toward president Obama centering on his “relationship” with Reverend Jeremiah Wright in May.
If seen at face value, these are wise words which I most certainly agree with. Candidates should not be using fallacies to win the election but rather a back and forth of discussions highlighting each candidate’s positive qualities and faults.  
However, as were all aware, this is not the order of the day and hasn’t been since the inception of the mudslinging and the television. So we see this issue of “character assassination” in political ad campaigns, but is Romney as innocent of this supposed character devaluation as his statement proposes?
Romney just recently released an ad that takes apart clips of Obama speech where he states, “If you’ve been successful you didn’t get there on your own…When we succeed we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.” The ad turned this speech into an attack on the hard work of small business owners. 
And then you have the right-wing constantly complaining that leftist like to use these “gotcha” ads to hurt their side. A “gotcha” ad is one that takes a “gotcha” moment in which a politician may have misspoken, and then uses it as the premise to dismiss their credibility. 
Obama saying, “If you’ve been successful you didn’t get their on your own” isn’t even really a “gotcha” moment because if you had listened to the rest of the speech what President Obama was trying to say is that, government investment in public institutions – like roads, bridges, subsidies, and school teachers – are what help individuals stimulate success rather than their own personal brilliance over the general population. 
However, the Romney campaign tried to turn this in to a “gotcha” moment, by cutting up pieces of the speech and manipulating them in a way that it sounds as if Obama is devaluing the hard work of small and large business owners to further promote his obviously socialist agenda. 
This is not the first time the Romney campaign tried to twist Obama’s words into an unappealing manner. His original November 2011 ad, took a clip from one of Obama’s speeches that said, "If we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose," and once again removed the ultimate message from the speech, which was we need to move forward as a nation to fix the economy.
So would these ads, as earlier stated by Romney, be the right way to conduct a campaign, probably not. But, we must realize that the Obama campaign is not innocent of this manipulative advertisement either.
“I don’t think Mitt Romney realizes what he’s done to people’s lives by closing the plant,” said Joe Soptic, a former steel worker for Bain Capital, in an anti-Romney ad sponsored by a Super PAC supporting Obama.
The video continues by Soptic telling the story of how when the plant was shut down he lost his health insurance and later his wife was diagnosed with terminal cancer and then she died because they no longer had insurance, and this was somehow a direct fault of Romney. 
I understand that the Obama campaign may not entirely agree with Romney’s view on economics and outsourcing, however, they’re stepping into dangerous ground when they try to directly link Romney with this women’s death. Maybe the campaign wasn’t trying to paint Romney as homicidal, however the ad creates a direct connection between this Republican candidate and her death and that is simply an immoral way to go about campaigning. 
Right now unemployment is at 8.3% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and in 2010 the number of uninsured American was at 16.3% according to a CNN article. That means that millions of people throughout the country are being laid off and cannot afford health care. Many businesses have chosen the same solutions of outsourcing like Romney and Bain Capital. I think everyone can agree that it would not be correct to try and find an individual story about lack of health care and loss of life for every company that’s closed down a branch or let go of workers, and there is most probably a story out there. 
However, you would no sooner associate any of those companies with being directly responsible for a death than you would Romney. This ad paints Romney in a completely unfair light, just as his ads that twist Obama words into un-American sentiments. 
Not all ads are horrible. Both Romney and Obama have released strictly positive ad campaigns that highlight their contributions to American society. But these ads don’t make news with the people. So perhaps it is somewhat also the fault of the voters that these “attack ads” are the rule of the day.
In an ad campaign project launched by TIME and Brookings Institute, 50% of a 200 person sample found Obama’s ad that set Romney’s “outsourcing of jobs, Swiss bank accounts, and Caymans corporations” to a – rather off key – rendition of “America the Beautiful” sang by the one and only Romney, memorable. 
This may have been a little cheesy in a horror movie sinister sort of fashion, but it proved to be affective among viewers. There are aren’t many news stories about the positive ads, and it seems that to grab the viewers interest candidates have to spend millions of dollars putting out vicious ads that tell fallacies and promote uncivil conduct. 
What we as citizens need to do is reform our culture from being centered around gimmicks and sly politics to focus on the real issues and debates if we ever expect our politicians to be as honest and true as we blame them for not being.