Michael Tomasky on What Will Happen When Romney Gets Desperate
I don’t know if team Romney should be panicking just yet. Convention bounces have been known to fade; it’s not every week that Barack Obama is going to get Bill Clinton to give a barn-burner of a speech on his behalf that outdraws the NFL game on the other channel. In my view it’s not so much that the fundamental nature of the race has shifted as that it has solidified: Obama spent months being mostly just a little ahead, and now he’s a little more ahead than that. Lots of people have been writing in the last couple days about the larger Obama lead. But no one has yet turned attention to the consequences of that change: that Romney and Paul Ryan are likely to run the dirtiest campaign we’ve seen in a long, long time.
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And the second fact that’s clear is that the economic argument is not working. Turns out that it’s not enough just to repeat the dour news when you keep dodging questions about your own plan. And taken together, these two facts mean: Romney isn’t going to desert the economic argument, of course, but he is going to try to win this thing in other ways.
He’s going to campaign with Pat Robertson. He’s going to work “Obama-Is-Anti-God” motifs into his stump speech, as he did yesterday. He’s going to keep running with the lies about welfare.
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If they can’t demonize slatternly women or Latinos or gay people, that pretty much leaves one group—a group the president happens to embody and represent pretty well. Romney hasn’t been shy about using race—see the dishonest welfare ads, or the mention of “Obamacare” before the NAACP, which, as I wrote at the time, was clearly designed so he’d be booed by the NAACP crowd, which would please certain other news consumers. (This was before Obama decided to “own” the word.)
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/11/michael-tomasky-on-what-will-happen-when-romney-gets-desperate.html
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