Intraparty Attacks Could Be November Liability for Romney
There’s a theory making the rounds that attacks from Mitt Romney’s fellow Republicans on his tenure at Bain Capital could actually help him in the end.
The theory goes like this: Mr. Romney, if he becomes the nominee, is very likely to be attacked on these grounds by President Obama and the Democrats. (This seems undeniable.) Maybe the attacks will be damaging to Mr. Romney and maybe they won’t. But since he’s going to endure them sooner or later, there is little marginal damage from them coming now.
In fact, it is claimed, it is better for Mr. Romney to deal with the attacks sooner, since it may make the public and the news media fatigued about the issue by the general election, and since it will give Mr. Romney’s campaign more practice in developing strong lines of defense to them. Some proponents of the theory have compared the attacks on Mr. Romney’s days at Bain Capital to those on Barack Obama’s associations with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., which drew considerably more public attention in the spring of 2008 than during the home stretch of the presidential campaign in the fall.
It’s a perfectly reasonable theory — but I don’t think it pays enough attention to the substance of the attacks and the way they are likely to be interpreted by the public and the news media. There are reasons that the comparison to the Wright story may not be appropriate, and why the attacks could in fact damage Mr. Romney in a general-election environment.
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Link: http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/intraparty-attacks-could-be-november-liability-for-romney/
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