The estimable Michael Tomasky makes an excellent point over at The Daily Beast today: “Mitt Romney is the least experienced person to run for president since…whom? Ross Perot, I suppose. But it you take a major-party candidate, I think you have to go back to Thomas Dewey or something.”
Compared to Romney’s four years as governor of Massachusetts (two of which were spent running for president), the 2008 then-Sen. Barack Obama was a wily veteran with 12 years in elected office (8 in the Illinois senate, 4 in the U.S. senate).
But Tomasky slides off the rails when he moves from time-in-office and and takes it one step further to assert that Romney “is definitely an inexperienced campaigner, and it shows every week.”
Romney spent over a year running for U.S. Senate in 1993-94 (he lost that election to Ted Kennedy), then spent a year running (successfully) for governor in 2002. And as Tomasky correctly notes, Romney’s been running for president pretty much non-stop for the past 7 1/2 years. That adds up to over 10 years of campaigning, or over 2/3 as long as Romney ran Bain Capital.
What shows every week is that Mitt Romney is a bad campaigner. But he’s not an inexperienced campaigner.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/