Romney Wants To Lynch Obama--Not as Bad As That

Since we've been treated to a week of race-baiting by Donald Trump and Fox News, who decided to attack President Obama for attending Easter services at Shiloh Baptist Church,it's understandable that progressive blogs would latch on Romney's statements yesterday at the Koch sponsored forum in New Hampshire. Romney has been peddling the return of the Misery Index for the last several months and yesterday he brought it up again and said " we will hang this on Obama." Check at the video at Democratic Underground or Talking Points Memo. Romney tried to catch himself before it became a major gaffe.

Washington Monthly had the right perspective. This was a lame performance by a candidate that we have been told is actually a front-runner for the Republican nomination. Romney appeared sans tie for his semi-folksy impression and virtually babbled economic platitudes and invoked Ronald Reagan. To me he looked young but pale as if the Koch Brothers had just reamed him out for not being as ruthless as the uberwealthy should be.

You have a real problem when the moderator comes across as more presidential than you are. And the moderator is a teabagger.

Since the beginning of the Obama Administration, Karl Rove and other Republican strategists have been laying down the groundwork for going after Obama as a second Jimmy Carter. If you think about it, no one except the politically active remember Jimmy Carter or his presidency. The man you see today is building homes for Habitat for Humanity and engaged in humanitarian work abroad. So the image among the elderly demographic the Republicans need is of an active, lively senior citizen actively contributing to the world. The hostages have come home from Iran. So the negative connotations of Carter are gone.

So the next hot idea was that you can use the Misery Index Reagan used effectively against Carter, against Obama. I've written about this before. You add unemployment and the rate of inflation. So Carter's was above 20 and Obama in the worst circumstance right now would be about 10. Then you have the very incovenient fact that Obama has created more jobs than the entire George W. Bush years in just 2 1/2. But Romney is fixated on this Misery Index as a great idea and I'm convinced that nothing will push him away from using it.

The Obama strategy is to adopt the Rovian theory of attacking Romney's perceived strength. For Republicans, this is his experience in the private sector and his years as governor. The Obama people should go right at his experience at Bain Capital, where Romney amassed enormous wealth by forcing companies to leverage their debt and then either down-sizing or going bankrupt. In other words, Romney's wealth has been acquired at the expense of thousands of American jobs. As Governor, in a boom economy he had the third worst record of job creation of the nation's governors.

Then we move to regional advertisements. We have the videotape evidence of Mitt Romney, the son of an automobile executive, saying that the American auto industry should not be bailed out and that those jobs aren't coming back. The Obama campaign should run this clip and Romney's treachery to his father's legacy in Michigan, Ohio and every Midwest state. And add how Barack Obama saved the auto industry, despite the criticisms of the Republicans.

I know the Obama people will never do the following. But if you thought like a Republican, you would want to suppress the fundamentalist vote, which always votes Republican. I would run ads in the South saying "Mitt Romney believes Jesus Christ is the brother of Lucifer, Do you?"And for more moderate states, I would link Romney with the most visible Mormon in the country--Glenn Beck. But this isn't going to happen but it should.

But the first entry into a candidate forum was a very lackluster performance by Romney. Romney's strategy has been to hold back and let the other candidates act like the lunatics they are and then emerge as the reasonable white father figure. Yesterday shows he has to pick up his game before he can actually implement such a strategy. He came across as he often does as an Empty Suit.