Messina brought a PowerPoint slide show and briefed the former President on campaign strategy. At the time, the Obama team was alternating between two arguments about Romney. One presented him as an inveterate flip-flopper, the other as a right-wing ideologue who would return the country to a pre-New Deal dystopia. Clinton advised them to stick with the second argument. It would help with fund-raising, he said; liberal donors would be more motivated to fight a fierce conservative. If they defined Romney as a flip-flopper, undecided voters might think that he could return to his moderate roots once he was in office. “They tried to do this to me, the flip-flopper thing,” Clinton said, according to someone in the room. “It just doesn’t work.” He told the Obama aides that voters never held the flip-flopper attacks against him because they felt that he would simply do what was right.And then today the Democrats lead off their convention with this.
The most crowd-pleasing parts of the seven-minute video Tuesday night featured snippets of debates from the 1994 contest for U.S. Senate between Kennedy and Romney, which were notably unflattering for the now-Republican nominee for president.
One exchange from the debate that year highlighted in the clip:
ROMNEY: “I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years, that we should sustain and support it. And I sustain and support that law and the right of a woman to make that choice.”
KENNEDY: “On the question of the choice issue — I have support the Roe v. Wade. I am pro-choice. My opponent is multiple choice.”
Har har har, I'm sure. But the man just told you this isn't going to work.
Clinton, of course, is the consummate politician. By holding Romney to his farthest-right positions, it not only turns off moderates, but it reminds them of his flip-flops without a word being spoken. And it forces Romney to stick harder to them. The one possible exception to that is Romneycare/Obamacare.
ReplyDeleteBut by acknowledging the flip-flops on abortion, etc., it reassures moderates that Romney may tack to the center after the election. And it leaves Obama wide open on the topic of same-sex marriage -- Romney can just chuckle and say "We all have positions that change; Barack, only a year ago you were against gay marriage..."