Obama Campaign Can’t Wait: Already Targeting Romney

The Washington Post reports top Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod (picture) used a 30 minute conference call with reporters to lay into GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, the day after popular New Jersey governor Chris Christie endorsed Romney. Pushing his attack on Romney for flip-flopping to near its logical limit, Axelrod said,

I will give [Romney] this. He is as vehement and as strong in his convictions when he takes one position and he is when he takes diametrically opposite positions. ... The comedian George Burns once said all you need for success in show business is sincerity and if you’ve got that, you’ve got it made. Maybe that’s true in politics sometimes. But not in a presidential campaign. People want to know who you are, what you believe in, what you stand for.

Axelrod’s comments follow what conservative Rush Limbaugh called an “obvious” leak—NBC reporter Michael Isikoff’s story that White House officials had a dozen meetings in 2009 with three Romney health-care advisers who helped shape the health care reform law Romney signed in 2006, with one meeting “in the Oval Office and presided over by Barack Obama.” One Romney advisor said the White House “really wanted to know how we can take that same approach we used in Massachusetts and turn that into a national model.”

Now Limbaugh thinks the Obama team is hoping to run against Romney because he is so beatable as a flip-flopper married to Obamacare’s Massachusetts’ sister, so he asks rhetorically why would the White House at this time, with the Republican nomination battle still undecided, be leaking material damaging to Romney? What gives? Limbaugh guesses the reason: Obama and company expect Romney to emerge as the eventual nominee, but hope that’s only after a long and drawn-out campaign that slows Romney’s momentum.

I think Limbaugh is onto something. Slowing down the Romney express allows more time for Republicans to beat him up inside the train, so that when he finally arrives at the nomination station, he’s in poor shape to take on Obama.

Oh my.