On Thursday, Megyn Kelly, host of "America Live" on the Fox News Channel, called out Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt over the campaign's broken promise to keep the "vitriol" and "name calling" out of the presidential race. Since making that pledge, team Obama has continually called GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney a "liar," Kelly pointed out.
Kelly began by playing a video featuring various campaign officials calling Romney names, including a "liar" and a "etch-a-sketch guy."
The host then followed up that video with another showing President Barack Obama recently saying: "We have to get to the point where we can have a conversation about big important issues that matter to the American people, without vitriol, without name calling, without assumptions of the worst in other people's motives."
"What happened to that message?" Kelly asked LaBolt.
LaBolt initially avoided answering the question and instead started talking about the vice presidential debate, forcing Kelly to interrupt him.
"I’m asking you what happened to that message," she said. "I want to talk to you about the vice presidential debate but I don’t want you to spin. I want you to answer my question, respectfully."
Kelly continued: "My viewers will say let’s have an answer to the question. The question is: President Obama said no vitriol, no name calling. Let’s have an honest conversation without questioning a man’s character. And yet Stephanie Cutter and all those other people you have just saw calling Mitt Romney a liar. What happened to President Obama’s commitment to no name calling and no character attacks?”
Labolt seemingly justified the personal character attacks, saying "28 days before election day, Mitt Romney has suddenly decided to try to hide the policies he’s been advocating for the last six years."
"Last week on the debate stage he pretended not to know anything about the central economic premise of his candidacy," he added.
Kelly then pressed the Obama campaign spokesman further to clarify the campaign's position on name calling and personal attacks.
“What I hear you saying is, it’s okay for the president to go back on that commitment through this team and surrogates and others because, in your view, Mitt Romney is a liar,” Kelly said, a little edge in her voice. “You are saying it’s justified because you really, really believe it."
LaBolt said he didn't "think" the goal of the Obama campaign was to "name call."
Kelly also grilled LaBolt about the fallout following the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi. She correctly stated that President Obama said Romney has a tendency to "shoot first and aim later" after the Republican issued a statement slamming the administration's handling of the attack. However, it is now apparent that it was the Obama administration, including the president himself, that was giving the American people and members of Congress bad information by blaming the attack on an anti-Muslim video instead of terrorism.
"In the wake of the testimony we heard on Capitol Hill about how this was a preplanned attack on our embassy, on our consulate in Libya, and it didn’t have to do with the video — directly contrary to what this administration told us in the days after this attack — didn’t you shoot first and aim later?” asked Kelly, practically the same question ABC's Jake Tapper asked White House Press Secretary Jay Carney on Wednesday.
"I don't think so," LaBolt replied.
He, like Carney, said the Obama camp was working with the intelligence information they had at the time.
Watch the entire interview via Fox News/Mediaite:
Front page image via AP.
