Douthat points out that in "both the ’92 convention and the ’80 debate, the challenger successfully escaped from the caricature that his rival was intent on drawing." He fears Romney can't follow in Clinton's and Reagan's footsteps:
For Romney to accomplish the same feat, he will need to reassure voters that he represents something more than just a rubber stamp for the interests of the wealthiest Americans. And this is why his ineffective response to the Bain attacks should be troubling to Republicans: Not because he hasn’t hit back hard enough, but because he hasn’t been able to smoothly pivot from the basic conservative message — free enterprise good, big government bad — to the more supple arguments that might complicate the White House’s efforts to caricature him as a Gordon Gekko.
The fatal element, it seems to me, is that Romney is insisting that people like him get even lower taxes than they now pay. Even lower than 13.9 percent. Perhaps as low as zero, as Romney might have (not) paid in 2009? Once you tie the persona of the super-rich outsourcing plutocrat to the following argument, the Obama message clicks into place:
[O]ne of the biggest differences is how we pay down our debt and our deficit. My opponent, Mr. Romney’s plan is he wants to cut taxes another $5 trillion on top of the Bush tax cuts… Well, first of all, like I said, the only way you can pay for that — if you’re actually saying you’re bringing down the deficit — is to cut transportation, cut education, cut basic research, voucherize Medicare, and you’re still going to end up having to raise taxes on middle-class families to pay for this $5 trillion tax cut.
That’s not a deficit reduction plan. That’s a deficit expansion plan.
Romney wants to cut the deficit by cutting taxes. Yes, we have heard that before, haven't we? It made no sense in the 1980s; and has been disproved ever since. But Romney is arguably the worst person to make the case. He sure has gotten a lot richer since the 1980s. But most Americans have been treading water.
The Dish 