Though the Obamans certainly hit John McCain hard four years ago—running more negative ads than any campaign in history—what they intend to do to Romney is more savage. They will pummel him for being a vulture-vampire capitalist at Bain Capital. They will pound him for being a miserable failure as the governor of Massachusetts. They will mash him for being a water-carrier for Paul Ryan’s Social Darwinist fiscal program. They will maul him for being a combination of Jerry Falwell, Joe Arpaio, and John Galt on a range of issues that strike deep chords with the Obama coalition. “We’re gonna say, ‘Let’s be clear what he would do as president,’ ” Plouffe explains. “Potentially abortion will be criminalized. Women will be denied contraceptive services. He’s far right on immigration. He supports efforts to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage.”
The Obama effort at disqualifying Romney will go beyond painting him as excessively conservative, however. It will aim to cast him as an avatar of revanchism. “He’s the fifties, he is retro, he is backward, and we are forward—that’s the basic construct,” says a top Obama strategist. “If you’re a woman, you’re Hispanic, you’re young, or you’ve gotten left out, you look at Romney and say, ‘This fucking guy is gonna take us back to the way it always was, and guess what? I’ve never been part of that.’ ”
Not to mention he thinks corporations are people, doesn’t worry about poor people cuz they have a safety net, and keeps his money in Swiss and Cayman Island bank accounts. Not to mention that he does weird and vaguely sociopathic things like holding down a gay kid and cutting his hair or strapping his dog to the roof of his car for a 12-hour drive on the interstate. Not to mention that he has flip-flop-flipped on almost every issue under the sun and actually tried to “take a lot of credit” for the auto bailout he opposed to anyone who would listen.
When it comes to Mitt Romney, there is so much negative to say that there almost isn’t enough time between now and the election to say it all. I mean, this is a guy who employed undocumented Mexicans for years to do his landscaping and then decided his immigration policy would be to make their lives so miserable that they’d just leave on their own. Is that classy, or what?
