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.
Go back in time a few months. The Romney theory, bruited by his aides and accepted by much of the media, was that all he had to do was talk about the economy and he’d win. There was no way an incumbent president sitting on these kinds of economic figures could possibly be reelected. Unemployed, underemployed, not even looking anymore, wrong direction … no question that they are all bleak figures. All Romney had to do was keep talking about them, and as they say in the East End, Robert’s your father’s brother.
This job was supposed to get even easier when Romney tapped Paul Ryan for veep. Ryan was the man with the plan, the Republican Brain, the guy who actually knew budgets and fiscal policy, the Republican who could slice right through all the Democratic pettifoggery and actually beat the Democrats at their own game of talking all those numbers. Ryan’s presence on the ticket made the economic choice that much more stark, the argument went, and he’d win over the serious-minded moderates.
Well. It’s exactly one month after Ryan’s selection was announced, and his reputation has gone nowhere but down. He’s a liar and his famous “numbers” actually make no sense at all because they’re intentionally misleading. So now he looks less like a serious budget person than a drunken back-bencher who has to be elbowed awake to cast a vote.
Read more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/09/11/michael-tomasky-on-what-will-happen-when-romney-gets-desperate.html
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