The Messaging is Muddy

Posted by on . 2 comments.

If you want to claim that you’re not attacking private equity, but examining Mitt Romney’s record as a job creator…

 

 

…the proper answer to that first question is “we’re not attacking private equity.”

Comments

  1. Thomas says:
    May 27, 2012 at 5:06 am

    Definitely muddy.  I think she was so determined to obey one gospel of debate — respond to questions, don’t answer them — that she walked right past a pretty straightforward rebuttal. 

    In 04 the Democrats pushed hard on Kerry’s military experience as his greatest strength, what with the wars being the overriding issue of the day. The Republicans responded less by arguing that Bush’s military experience was superior than by relentlessly characterizing Kerry’s service as proof of his cowardice and incompetence.  This was the swiftboat innovation: Redefine your opponent’s best asset as his greatest lability.  To this day the GOP base will chortle over how Kerry hilariously bluffed his way into three phony purple hearts, total BS silver and bronze stars, all as laughable as Gore’s Oscar or Obama’s Nobel. He was a crybaby about a couple little scratches and maybe, as Michelle Malkin floated the idea, maybe he even shot himself for the attention. I think Team Obama’s strategy here is similar, at least in that they seem to be trying to take what looks on its face like irrefutable evidence of success—Mitt got rich—and redefine it as irrefutable evidence of psychopathy and failure. 
    It’s a promising plan, particularly since Romney is just so out of step with everybody on everything else. The business success is everything. There is no military experience, no fundamentalist conviction, no redemptive character arc, no frontier experience, no inexplicable personal magnetism, nothing but the amassing of a fortune. If that can successfully be cast as rapacious and predatory, as Mitt getting rich by firing people and destroying companies, his campaign is entirely sunk.  The  Democrats need to sharpen up their line of attack, but they’ve got the right target.

  2. Thomas says:
    June 4, 2012 at 7:48 am

    And this morning, a terrific elaboration on exactly this point:

    http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/06/04/why-obama-campaign-should-keep-attacking-romney-over-bain-capital.html