Less than 12 hours after Romney clinched the GOP nomination, the DNC is out with "Little to Like," a cutesy, if effective, ad mocking Mitt Romney on the Facebook page of the world. The ad links his savage success at Bain Capital to his general incompetence as governor of Massachusetts, attempting to corrupt both sides of Romney's argument that his private secotr success makes him uniquely qualified for public office.
The conceit is clever—a stroll through Mitt Romney's Facebook page if it were set up not by him but reality. There's his GOP primary opponents talking about his record as 47th in job creation in MA, and there's a newscaster talking about his hidden wealth. When we come to a headline about his tax policies, clicking the like button shows "Millionaires like this." And finally, we get a tour through Romney's most embarrassing statements—I like to the fire people, corporations are people, and all your favorite hits—as if they were statuses Romney posted drunk outside the bar and now can't delete.
Greg Sargent has the best read on this. Romney's entire argument is that his private sector experience qualifies him to steward a troubled economy. But thus far, Romney's campaign hasleft what that means up to the voter. Picture economic success in your head, and whatever you see, that's what Mitt Romney is. Now compare that vague vision of success to Obama's very specific record:
Many voters still see Romney as just a generic economic alternative to Obama — their willingness to accept that Romney can turn around the economy is rooted in their disillusionment with Obama for failing to do so as fast as they’d hoped.
Obama's task is to define Romney down from his vague description of himself as successful; in other words, take Romney's argument of "Private Sector Success = Executive Success" and fill in exactly what "private sector success" and "executive success" mean. The Bain Capital ads first planted doubts about what Romney did in the private sector. Now the Obama campaign wants to show how poorly that experience has transferred to executive office. If Romney's business experience is so great, why is his tenure in Massachusetts mixed at best?
Again, via Sargent:
Obama needs to persuade voters to do more than simply accept Romney as an alternative to the economic status quo who’s worth taking a flyer on. He needs to get them to look past general impressions of Romney’s competence and to realize that Romney is offering an actual set of policies and ideas about the economy that have been tried before. His “Mr. Fix It” aura — which is rooted in the pitch that he can translate private sector know-how to the public sector — is belied by his actual record as a public official. The point the Obama campaign needs to drive home is that Romney has already tried to bring his private sector experience to bear on the public sector, even if he isn’t eager to talk about it.
The undermining of competence happens as much in the tone of the ad as in any of the arguments presented. The Bain Capital ads looked like they were made up of outtakes from The Road. The implication: for workers laid off under Bain Capital's management, it was the end of their world. The ads struck an ominous tone, implying that Romney's private sector success was much more sinister than we thought.
The music under this new ad, however, suggests more slapstick than anything else. Whereas the Bain Capital ads wanted Romney to be the evil machinator of private sector layoffs, this new ad wants you to think that the exact same qualities that made Romney so villainous in the private sector make him an incompetent buffoon in elected office. This dovetails with Obama's argument about venture capitalism: however fine it may be for making money, its skills are antithetical to a job that requires looking out for everybody, including workers. Even if you buy that Romney was a successful example of American capitalism, that success will make not him a competent leader.
Will this work? It's slightly more calculus than Romney's argument, which is Obama = economy = bad. It requires viewers to hold a mutlifaceted view of Romney, that he can be both chillingly efficacious at generating profits at the expense of workers while clownishly bad at running a state. Those two are not mutually exclusive, but if you're looking to tar a candidate with an easy label, they seem at odds with one another. If Romney's so capacious as to crush companies like soda cans while making millions of dollars, why couldn't he run a country?
Because he couldn't run a state. "Little to Like" is the beginning of a long salvo of attacks on Romney's record in Massachusetts, the whole goal of which is to question the transference between private sector experience and executive success. If Romney wants to sell Private Sector Success = Presidential Success, the Obama campaign will make him defend both sides of that equation, with Bain Capital on one end and Massachusetts on the other.
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