TAMPA—So I was sitting in the Tampa Bay Times Forum the other night and I was confused because on the big screens over the arena they kept playing video segments that, at first blush, looked and sounded like those classic Barack Obama ads from 2008—there was the upbeat background music, afternoon-light shots of American vistas, and over it all, his disembodied voice in its most exhortatory mode. And here's what he said:

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—if you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.

The crowd roared in delirious disapproval, because this was of course not an Obama ad but a sort of mirror image of one, held up to mock the man. This, after all, was Obama's notorious riff from a stump speech last month in Roanoke, Va., when he tried to echo Elizabeth Warren's viral YouTube riff last year about how "there is nobody in this country who got rich on his own." But, wait a second, I thought—was this clip I was hearing boomed into the hall, over and over, really what Obama had said? I looked it up again to be sure. And here's what he said in Roanoke.

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own. I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there. It must be because I worked harder than everybody else. Let me tell you something—there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there. If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that.

The lines that I've put in bold here? They were gone from the clip. The riff simply flowed past where they had been, with not a ripple to signal the elision. It was exceedingly artful—the surgeons had even retained the first clause from one of the excised lines in order to strengthen the key final line. It was, I recalled, what had been done with Obama's riff when it was used in campaign ads and Fox News clips in the weeks after he said it; in fact, just a few hours earlier I'd seen Fox News play just the most damning final line. And here it was, the longer, spliced-together riff, being piped into this hall with a captive audience of thousands.

This struck me as rather irksome. See, I'm a journalist, and I work with words, and it's always bothered me when anyone uses, or plays with, words to knowingly deceive others. But from what I could tell, my disquiet was not necessarily shared by my colleagues in the press risers, who mostly remained bent over their laptops, seemingly oblivious to the incessant video loop. This surprised me—after all, while campaigns often took words out of context, they rarely built entire convention themes out of such tricks (the Democrats had chortled for a few weeks over Romney's less-bad-in-context remark that he liked "being able to fire people," but they had never constructed an entire ad campaign around it.) Whereas this brazen editing of Obama's riff seemed very much in keeping with the Romney campaign's equally brazen declaration that the Obama administration is doing away with the welfare work requirement.

So I did what any petulant reporter does: I took to Twitter. But I did not find much sympathy there from colleagues. (A representative response came from Richard Grenell, a sharp-witted conservative who was briefly Romney's foreign policy spokesman: "@Richard Grenell: lol. You sound sad about it." Well, yes.) Clearly, I had no choice but to submit to the good intentions of the Romney campaign's editorial judgment. Perhaps I simply hadn't listened to the edited clip enough.