Obama To Campaign On Romney’s Weirdness

Yesterday Politico reported that the Obama campaign’s political strategy right now for 2012 is to assume Romney will be the nominee and attack him for being “weird”:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.

The dramatic and unabashedly negative turn is the product of political reality. Obama remains personally popular, but pluralities in recent polling disapprove of his handling of his job, and Americans fear the country is on the wrong track. His aides are increasingly resigned to running for reelection in a glum nation. And so the candidate who ran on “hope” in 2008 has little choice four years later but to run a slashing, personal campaign aimed at disqualifying his likeliest opponent…

Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

Now, look, I don’t like Romney myself and I think he’s probably inauthentic, unprincipled, and maybe even weird, but there are three reasons this admission by Obama’s political campaign strategists is much weirder.

1. First, this is not some random attack from a conservative talk show host. These words come straight from Obama’s advisers to Politico, a generally non-partisan straight-up news source. To come right out and admit to the world that they’re going straight to character assassination is weird to begin with – usually politicians at least pretend they’re going to take the high road for awhile. But it’s especially weird coming from the “hope and change” campaign. Attack On Weirdness doesn’t sound like a good way to fire up a disillusioned base or win back those skeptical independent voters. Jonah Goldberg’s tweet adds the zinger: “Too bad Romney’s white. If he was black his supporters could call Obama attacks on his character and background racist.”

2. Second, it seems a little premature to be talking about these kinds of strategies now. Sure, Romney is generally considered one of the front runners, but so was Romney at this time four years ago, along with Giuliani. And Romney just doesn’t have cred with the evangelical or the anti-establishment wings of the GOP – he’s too Mormon and he’s too elite. In 2008, there might have been a third-party rogue if Romney was the GOP nomination; in 2012, there definitely would be (In My Humble Opinion). If anything, Obama should be encouraging Romney’s campaign at this point because most of the Tea Party will never vote for him and splitting the GOP is the best thing Obama can do for his own re-election.

3. Third, and perhaps weirdest of all, no matter what attacks the Obama campaign makes on Romney, he can’t be weirder than Obama’s own vice-president Joe Biden. Joe Biden’s continuous string of ridiculous statements are so well-known that if you type “joe biden” into Google, “joe biden gaffes” is one of the top autosuggest options. Recently we had Biden agreeing that Tea Partiers are terrorists, even after Democrats called for an end to violent political language after Gifford’s shooting that the GOP was blamed for. But that’s just the latest. It’s too bad Biden never got grilled for the same historical inaccuracies that Sarah Palin did when he mixed up the president and the use of TVs in 1929. Whether it’s calling “J-O-B-S” a three-letter word or blessing the dead soul of the very-much-alive Irish prime minister’s mother, Joe Biden’s gaffes serve as a frequent political laughingstock. Now many of Biden’s statements may be the harmless humored ramblings of an old man, but I don’t think the Obama campaign can legitimately say that Mitt Romney is weirder.

It’s sure gonna be a long fifteen months…