Obama ad hits Romney's use of miners forced to serve as unpaid prop

Mitt Romney's campaign stop at a Murray Energy coal mine in Ohio continues to haunt him. Romney thought coal miners made such a good backdrop for his speech there that he even used the footage in an ad attacking President Obama as insufficiently pro-coal, only to have it turned back on him in an Obama ad using the exact same footage. Given that by the time Romney's ad aired, it had been widely reported that the miners had lost half a day's pay to attend the event, which their boss had told them was mandatory, it's kind of amazing Romney went there to begin with, but he did, and he's paying.

First Romney got hit with a slew of headlines focusing not on his ad's message but on how those miners got there, their jobs in the mine shut down for Romney's visit, their ability to earn a wage taken from them for those hours in which they were still required to be at the mine, listening to Romney. Now, the Obama campaign is using the footage to highlight that Romney is "not one of us."

That's not a hard point to make. What would Mitt Romney know about being forced by the boss to take unpaid time off to attend a political event? In his own career, he was the boss. And now, he thinks the Murray Energy miners have "a great boss" in Bob Murray, who not only set up this event but who has in the past lied about the company's actions leading up to a fatal mining accident and who is a fierce opponent of improved safety regulations. Mitt Romney identifies with and would govern for the Bob Murrays of the world. That means he's for damn sure not part of any "us" that has to work for a living.