How many degrees of ugliness are there? Our Quote of the Day is from NBC’s First Read which tries to stand back and sort it out:
*** Getting nasty: So much for that debate about big ideas and sharp contrasts. Just days after Mitt Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate, the presidential campaign yesterday devolved into nasty charges and countercharges. Tuesday began, according to NBC’s Carrie Dann, with Vice President Joe Biden assailing Romney and the Republicans for wanting to end the new regulations on Wall Street. “Unchain Wall Street,” he said. “They’re going to put you all back in chains.” The Romney campaign took offense to the comment, which Biden later clarified was a reference to the GOP’s rhetoric about the “unshackling” of economic forces. And Romney unloaded on President Obama in his final event on his four-day bus tour, accusing his opponent’s campaign of engaging in “division and anger and hate.” The Obama camp fired back at Romney, calling his remarks “unhinged” and “particularly strange coming at a time when he’s pouring tens of millions of dollars into negative ads that are demonstrably false.” And Obama himself capped things off by twice making reference to the Romney dog that endured a family vacation on top of the Romneys’ car. So just when we thought last week’s third-grade insults (“Romney Hood” and “Obama-loney”) couldn’t get any lower, yesterday felt like the moment that both campaigns dug in and truly started hating each other.
And, First Read notes, Camp Romney could be playing what could be an effective OR highly risky game:
*** The strategy here (and danger) for Romney: What’s fascinating is
the Romney campaign’s decision to bring a gun to a knife fight yesterday. It could have knocked Biden for making yet another gaffe or another odd statement. But instead, it decided to step on the gas and use the harshest language possible — “anger” and “hate” — against Obama. And there seems to be an obvious strategy here: The Romney camp seems intent on muddying the Obama brand to narrow the likeability gap; it’s too hard to bring Romney up to Obama’s favorability levels, so they want to drag him down instead. But there also is a potential danger here for Romney: For one thing, he opens himself up to criticism that he can dish out the attacks (see those constant references to Obama apologizing for America or not understanding America), but that he can’t take them. And two, the entire conversation about negativity distracts from Romney’s message. After all, we’re no longer talking about the economy or Romney’s plan, or now even his new running mate.
I continue to be among those who believe that the less Romney talks about the economy, the less effective his campaign will be.
Pushing partisan hot buttons, or trying to define or redefine Obama won’t do what Romney needs to do: convince Americans that they need to fire Barack Obama because he has not done the job as Chief Executive that they hired him to do. This means laying out clearcut, non-fudged affirmative plans for how Romney would fix the current situation. Romney’s danger is that he’ll be applauded on Fox News and by Rush, Sean, etc. but if he belched in a rightward direction or stuck out his tongue at Obama he’d be cheered for that.
The more his campaign doesn’t focus on jobs and what he’d do to create them the more tougher his task will be and even controversial laws that seemed aimed at supressing key parts of the Democrats’ coalition from voting may not be enough to save him.
It’s almost as if the Obama campaign is a Venus Fly Trap — drawing Romney into political actions that in the end may prove to be his undoing when in terms of the economy the Oval Office is within his grasp.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.