Tax cheat, felon, murderer: meet Mitt Romney, if Barack Obama's backers are to be believed

Tax cheat. Felon. Murderer.

Not exactly the inspiring words one would expect to describe the man who seeks to lead a purportedly civilised nation, but those are the incendiary charges being thrown at Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney by supporters of President Barack Obama. They are ludicrous insinuations on which the administration and Democratic leadership have been uniformly and appallingly silent.

This is a good example of the downside of message discipline. But nor is Team Romney unsullied in its return fire, playing to people's fears about a tyrannical president run amok.

Politics bring out the ugliest in America. Sadly, the once promised "hope" and "change" of the historic 2008 presidential campaign have been forgotten; hypocrisy now rules.

Granted, the successful political narrative message requires a victim and a villain, a resolution, and a hero, but what is unusual this election season is the extent of the villainy.

Though "innocent until proven guilty" is a treasured American principle based on common law dating back to early Roman times, Senate leader Harry Reid has publicly accused Mitt Romney of not paying any taxes for 10 years without a shred of proof.

When challenged as to his evidence, Sen Reid responded: "The burden should be on him (Romney). He's the one I've alleged has not paid any taxes."

It's a "Catch-22" for Romney. Though no law requires presidential candidates to release their returns, to combat the labels of tax cheat and potential felon he would have to release more than the last two years of his tax returns, which he has been unwilling to do.

But Reid's incivility pales compared to the latest attack.

An ad produced by Priorities USA, an outside group with limitless spending potential supporting President Obama's re-election, features the heart-wrenching story of Joe Soptic, a middle-class American in the heart of the country. Soptic, according to the ad, not only lost his job and his health insurance benefits after the closure of a steel plant in Kansas City, Missouri, but also lost his wife to cancer.

The blame for his wife's death is not so subtly placed on the shoulders of Mitt Romney, who once headed Bain Capital, the private equity group which closed the bankrupt plant in 2001. That was two years after Romney left daily management of the firm to rescue the Salt Lake City Olympics and - it has emerged since the ad was run - a full five years before Mrs Soptic's death.

Although the brutally implied cause-and-effect relationship is separated not only by years but also by the truth, and despite the ad having been thoroughly debunked by neutral fact-checking organisations, the damage has been done - not just to Romney's reputation but also to that of Team Obama, which by its failure to denounce the ad is now complicit in its claims.

Of course, the mudslinging this year is not one-sided. The Romney campaign itself has released a television spot accusing Obama of gutting welfare reforms, enacted by a bipartisan Congress in 1996, by removing any work requirement. "Under Obama's plan, you wouldn't have to work and wouldn't have to train for a job," the ad declares. "They just send you your welfare cheque."

This is not as personal an attack as the felon and murderer accusations levelled against Romney. But the deliberate misrepresentation of waivers that allow local flexibility in managing welfare programmes resonates with those who suspect another attempt to bypass Congress, and who fear the growth of unchecked power in Obama's hands.

Rough campaigning is nothing new America; in fact it's been a common staple ever since 1800 when Thomas Jefferson hired a smear merchant to accuse John Adams, then president, of wanting to attack France.

More recently Lyndon Johnson produced an ad that implied his Republican rival had a quick trigger finger and would be likely to create a nuclear armaggaedon. And George HW Bush famously advertised that his opponent had let felons out of jail who went on to rape and murder innocent victims.

But the problem is worsening every day as the election approaches, because there is now no accountability and no price to pay.

The Supreme Court's recent authorisation of unlimited spending by outside groups acutely compounds the problem.

The law technically bars these groups from coordinating with the candidates, so that whenever a particularly outrageous ad is produced - like last week's connecting Romney to a woman's death - the campaigns simply say: "We didn't know about it, and we can't do anything about it."

Which is not entirely true.

President Obama and his campaign could and should denounce that ad and demand that it be pulled off the air - because unless and until they do, any remaining notions about "Hope and Change" will continue to erode, and voters will find it ever harder to believe anything anyone says.

Mark McKinnon, a former Republican strategist who worked on the campaigns of George W Bush and John McCain, is Global Vice Chair of Hill+Knowlton Strategies

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