Mitt Romney’s been running for president nonstop for almost 8 years now. (It was an open secret in Massachusetts that he spent most of his last two years as governor preparing for the ’08 presidential campaign.) So it’s hard to believe that Romney’s—and his campaign staff’s—feelings are so tender that they seem to have lost their political minds:
“Meanwhile, Romney’s aides remain particularly livid about Obama spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter’s suggestion last week that Romney committed a crime by filing apparently conflicting documents to the FEC and SEC.
‘[Obama’s] policies have been such utter failures, the only thing he can do is to try to destroy a decent man and his wife,’ the adviser said. ‘So he gets some hack political adviser from Chicago who has nothing to point to in her own life, and tells her to call him a felon… When did our politics get to that point? I mean, it’s Nixonian.‘”
First, Cutter never attacked Ann Romney. Second and more importantly, Stephanie Cutter isn’t a Chicago hack.
She’s from Massachusetts…where Democratic political operatives like Cutter take pride in being heirs to over a century’s worth of hard-earned knowledge and experience at finding and exploiting the political vulnerabilities of rich, entitled, square-jawed Republican WASPs like Mitt Romney. Which is exactly what Cutter did last week when she said in a carefully crafted, precisely aimed statement, “Either Mitt Romney, through his own words and his own signature, was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the SEC, which is a felony. Or he was misrepresenting his position at Bain to the American people to avoid responsibility for some of the consequences of his investments.”
It’s only July. If senior Romney campaign strategists are as rattled as they seem to be, then it doesn’t speak well for how they (and their candidate) will hold up October.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/
