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Both sides are experiencing this in real time: Questions about Romney's bad behavior toward classmates during his high school years, revealed in a recent Washington Post article, are being used to reinforce the profile that Romney's critics have tried to create of the GOP candidate as a corporate bully. The Democratic National Committee circulated the Post article and highlighted just one sentence about Romney's behavior: "It was vicious." Questions about Obama's ties to his former preacher's incendiary rhetoric about America and about whether the president was truly born in Hawaii and is a Christian fit with broader efforts to paint Obama as radically different from most Americans. Romney earlier this year told an interviewer, "I'm not sure which is worse, him listening to Reverend Wright or him saying that we must be a less Christian nation." That was a reference to remarks in which Obama actually did not promote a less Christian nation but observed growing religious diversity in the U.S. When something nicely fits with the profile that one side or the other is trying to build, it may endure long after a question has been duly asked and answered. Questions about the validity of Obama's Hawaii birth certificate, for example, have been widely discredited, they but keep popping up. Donald Trump and Texas Gov. Rick Perry both toyed with it during the presidential primaries. A poll last May, after Obama had released his detailed Hawaii birth certificate, found that a third of Americans still thought he might have been born elsewhere or said they didn't know. Cornog points to plenty of positive aspects to the free-wheeling exchange of ideas and information allowed by a broad variety of news sources and the Internet but also has a warning: "If you enter an age in which you have elective belief systems independent of fact, you have a problem for your political world."
[Associated
Press;
AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius in Washington contributed this report.
Follow Nancy Benac on Twitter at http://twitter.com/nbenac.
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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