It's official: Romney has jumped the shark
Once you start trying to campaign on the idea that Obama is going to take the word "God" off of coins you know it's a wrap.
"Mitt Romney suggested Saturday in Virginia Beach that President Obama wants to remove God from coins, provoking a fierce retort from the president's campaign."
"I will not take God out of our platform," the Republican nominee said after reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. "I will not take God off our coins, and I will not take God out of my heart."
"In response, Obama spokeswoman Lis Smith called the insinuation false and an act of desperation."
"It’s disappointing to see Mitt Romney try to throw a Hail Mary by launching extreme and untrue attacks against the President and associating with some of the most strident and divisive voices in the Republican Party, including Rep. Steve King and Pat Robertson," she said in a statement. "This isn’t a recipe for making America stronger, it’s a recipe for division and taking us backward."
http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/romney-implies-obama-will-remove-god-from-coins
Despite how much Romney has tried to make this a pure referendum on the economy, the Romney team for some time has understood that this is not enough.
Put it this way: the economy is recovering though not fast enough right now-though it may well be that this will change soon as Bill Clinton suggested the other night-but even if it weren't, that still might not be enough.
See Krugman for the question whether or not we're actually on the mend.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/05/is-the-economy-on-the-mend/
There has been the need for the racist dog whistle. Obviously, Romney's team will fiercely deny that they are doing anything of the kind.
However, behind the scenes, they are quite circumspect: this election is about Romney maximizing the white vote, nothing more, nothing less.
Romney publicly made the vow to get Hispanic votes back in the high 30s that he knows he'll never get. What he really needs to do is maximize the white vote. He has set a goal of 61%:
"Team Romney has set a target of 61 percent of the white vote, according to reporting by Ron Brownstein. It won’t be easy."
“If he reaches 61 percent among whites, he would equal the best performance ever for a Republican presidential challenger with that group of voters: Dwight Eisenhower in 1952, Ronald Reagan in 1980, and George H.W. Bush in 1988 each won between 56 percent and 61 percent of white voters, according to polls at the time,” Brownstein reports.
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=6480818427597300387
The Romney team has an awarness of what they're doing:
"As for Romney’s effort to capture the presidency with so little support from minorities, he is fighting the inexorable demographic changes that are diversifying the electorate as a whole. “This is the last time anyone will try to do this,” one Romney adviser told Brownstein."
As usual, Pat Buchanan gives you the unfiltered game plan and it's problems. That Romney adviser admits that this is a desperate strategy. Listen to Buchanan's extrapolation of it:
"Of the seven mega-states, California, New York and Illinois appear lost to the GOP. Pennsylvania has not gone Republican since 1988. Ohio and Florida, both crucial, are now swing states. Whites have become a minority in Texas. When Texas goes, America goes."
"This year could be the last hurrah."
http://townhall.com/columnists/patbuchanan/2012/07/27/in_the_long_run_is_the_gop_dead/page/2
I'm actually in a way pretty darn heartened by this latest meltdown out of Romney. Clearly he sees that trying to hang the economy on the President isn't sufficient, so he's now truly desperate. His team is likely spooked by the polls that show the President lapped him in the conventions.
http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/09/obamas-post-convention-bounce-growing.html
Remember his Birther "joke" two weeks ago? This is the second part of that joke and it's funny indeed.
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