Friday, July 20, 2012

A line of attack with legs?

It's a cliche that political attacks work only when they have some demonstrable relationship to reality -- when they touch a chord of genuine perception about a candidate.

By that standard, Obama campaign attack theme spotlighted today by Reuters would seem to have long-term potential:
"Feeding the Democrats' storyline: Romney's refusal to release more than a year or two of his tax returns, questions about whether he is being honest about when he left his job at Bain Capital, and the reams of records that have been kept secret from his years as Massachusetts governor and chief of the Salt Lake City Olympics."
Shucks, is that all? Methinks Reuters' Jeff Mason writes with a keen sense of the reality gap between this gambit and 2008's "who is Barack Obama?":


The Obama team's tactic - summed up in its new TV ad that asks, "What is Mitt Romney hiding?" - is similar to a Republican strategy that Obama overcame en route to winning the presidency in 2008.

Back then, some conservatives claimed Obama was secretly a Muslim with a socialist agenda who had not been born in the United States, and therefore wasn't eligible to be president.
For Romney, the secrecy theme -- that Romney is an arrogant plutocrat who must hide the extent to which he's rigged every game in his own favor --  hooks up with the Obama campaign's core message about Romney: that his policy agenda --imposed on him though it has been by his party -- serves the interests of the 1% at the expense of everyone else. Which also has the benefit of being true.


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