Zuckerman Calls Obama Campaign 'Dishonest, Divisive'

Mortimer Zuckerman, the influential Democrat editior-in-chief of U.S. News & World Report called the Obama campaign “dishonest, divisive” in an article published in the online edition of the magazine.

“It is a dishonest, divisive campaign. It's discouraging of enterprise,” he penned. “It does the opposite of uniting the country to deal with the current economic crisis.”

Zuckerman, who is also the publisher and owner of the New York Daily News, said that Obama’s argument on taxes “is not just about whether the super-rich should pay more,” which he would support.

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“It is about whether individuals, households, and small businesses should now be seen to cross the threshold into a plutocracy when earnings reach $250,000 a year — which buys much less in metropolitan areas than in the heartland,” according to Zuckerman. “It is outrageous to infer that aspiring to reach such a level is somehow un-American, and the Obama campaign surely must know that. Shame on them if they don't!”

Zuckerman blamed “careless remarks” on the part of GOP challenger Mitt Romney for allowing Obama to “get away with a program that pits ‘the millionaires and billionaires’ against the people.”

He said that Romney’s gaffes have put his entire candidacy at risk “to the point where he may not even qualify for the dismissive equation of Barack Obama that Marco Rubio formulated for the Republican faithful: "Our problem is not that he's a bad person. Our problem is that he's a bad president."

Zuckerman said that Romney’s “47 percent” remarks handed the Obama campaign a new line of attack.

“Voters can forgive a candidate who stumbles in the heat of an election, trapped by ‘gotcha’ questions from journalists, being quoted out of context in cunning TV attack commercials, and in the Twitter age, failing to appreciate that nothing that is said is secret anymore,” said Zuckerman. “We all know the game, and Romney has demonstrated that he is not perfect at this game.”

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Despite Romney’s mistakes, he believes that the campaign can still be salvaged.

“Romney's new language talks about appealing to the 100 percent. He will be doing well to reach 50 percent,” Zuckerman noted. “But he still has a chance at reversing the weak position if he will go all out on the economy, discourage personal attacks on the president (who is well liked anyway), and always remember the injunction the British were faced with every day when World War II started, ‘Loose talk costs lives. Think before you talk.’"