Mitt's Dilemma

 

Pity poor Mitt Romney: he has to beat an incumbent with favorability ratings hovering around 40-50%, with a flagging economy and some of the worst press ever, and yet can only manage to draw about even with him.

 

What's a billionaire to do to win an election? I guess, attack the successes of the President?

Mitt Romney’s campaign events and the firepower of American Crossroads will both focus this week on President Barack Obama’s jobs record as a way to fight off charges about the Republican candidate’s private-sector experience, with a Romney aide attacking the stimulus as “the mother of all earmarks.”

This week is a preview of coming attraction for the general election campaign, with American Crossroads, the outside Republican group poised to spend $300 million this cycle, pushing a message that amplifies the Romney campaign’s storyline.

A senior campaign aide said Romney will argue that Obama has actually subtracted jobs: “Were these investments the best return on tax dollars, or given for ideological reasons, to donors, for political reasons? He spent $800 billion of everybody’s money. How’d it work out?”

It seemed to work fine: most of it was paid back, GM and Chrysler are both making money again and the economy is slowly picking up steam while the unemployment rate has cooled off almost 1.5%

 

Sure beats the Hoover-style tax cuts of Bush and the GOP over the past ten years. Plus, Mitt might want to consider who he's really chiding in his silliness: his banking buddies, who begged for relief from the Obama administration. Remember TARP?

 

This comes on the heels of, well, perhaps the silliest thing Mitt Romney has said seriously this season:

But he ticked off a list of global threats and said: "I wish I could tell you that the world is a safe place today."

Romney said the country must not shrink its military to the point where the U.S. loses its status as the strongest power in the world.

"Were we to follow that kind of course, there would be no one that could stand to protect us," he said.

Osama bin Laden and Muammar Qaddafi would respectfully disagree. Actually, not so respectfully, which is why Obama killed them in his first term. And the US suddenly becoming a second-rate superpower over the next four years is unlikely to happen, but if it did, it would be a damnation of the American economy having been starved for tax revenues, and not an inclination on the part of Obama to dismantle the machine.

If anything, Obama has proven rather too quick to pull triggers.

This all points to one thing, and one thing only: Mitt's inability to stop lying about something, even when the facts are clearly against him.

Next up: race relations, no doubt.