Last fall, as he was establishing the overall strategy for his campaign, Mitt Romney and his team were confident that the Obama presidency would collapse of its own weight; that the economic and job-performance numbers were so bad that the president was unelectable. They felt that the slogan they came up with, "Obama Isn't Working," was so self-evident that all they needed to do was depict how bad things were and the race was over. They saw it as nothing more or less than a referendum on Obama's (and the economy's) record. They were wrong.
Neither charismatic nor convincing, Romney has failed to establish himself as a credible, trusted vehicle for delivering attacks against the president. As a businessman used to spreadsheets and the cold calculus of the deal, he seems to have regarded voters as shareholders in a troubled company, who would welcome a takeover based on what the balance sheets showed.
The GOP candidate's action plan is so vague that it allows the president to be vague, too. And in many cases, Romney is poorly positioned to launch an attack, in part because of the radical anti-government stance he has adopted for this 2012 race. Rather than lean on the banks to write more mortgages, for example, Romney wants to lean on them less, for anything.
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