Put RNC Chairman Reince Priebus up against DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz in a competency contest and Priebus wins every time. While DWS continues to make headlines with appalling claims, dictionary-definition-defying accusations and misbegotten explanations of purported solutions to the Medicare problem, Priebus quietly works to right the RNC fiscal ship and appears on national TV offering intelligent commentary on, say, the president’s latest substance-less speech.

So, when I read that Priebus decided to take a leaf out of DWS’ book and make a combative Midwest appearance to coincide with the president’s first pitstop on his much-vaunted “jobs tour,” I couldn’t help but wonder why Priebus would want to emulate Debbie Downer in any way (to do so at all just seems so beneath him!). DWS didn’t do herself any favors by showing up and stumping at the Iowa State Fair, that’s for sure. But then I delved into the details, and I think the RNC is pretty clever in this case:

The Republican National Committee will launch a “grassroots, media and on-the-ground” effort during President Barack Obama’s bus tour through the Midwest this week, The Daily Caller has learned. The RNC has dubbed the trip the “Debt-End Bus Tour,” or “DEBT.”

RNC chairman Reince Priebus will hold a press conference on Monday with Minnesota GOP chair Tony Sutton in Cannon Falls, Minn. — the first stop on the President’s tour — to draw attention to the slow-growing U.S. economy. …

In a guide the RNC plans to hand out Monday morning, it slams Obama’s economic policies and criticizes him for taking a so-called non-campaign trip without producing a plan to deal with the country’s debt.

In the guide, the RNC calls President Obama’s debt plan “A Big Ol’ Hunk of Nothing on Two Thick Slices of Nada.”

Sounds about right to me. Remember how even an MSM outlet subtly expressed skepticism that Obama would actually “listen” to the needs of job creators on this tour? Obama is eminently assailable on the jobs record of his administration. As the RNC’s distribution materials point out, the state of Iowa has shed 21,100 jobs since Obama became president, Minnesota lost 51,000 and Illinois saw a whopping 125,700 jobs evaporate. The facts are hard to fudge.

And that Obama has chosen to respond to chronically high unemployment with yet another tour and no concrete plan — more talk, that is, but still no action — just leaves him that much more vulnerable to the RNC’s apt criticisms. A thinly veiled series of self-promotional bus stops in blue states aching for a real economic recovery sounds a very “off” note right about now. No matter how hard Obama tries to spin his economic record (or how hard DWS tries to spin it for him — she said at the fair that the economy has “stabilized” under President Obama’s leadership), he can’t disguise that he’s grown the debt at an unprecedented pace or that unemployment, which the stimulus was supposed to have reduced to less than 8 percent in short order, remains above 9 percent. In other words, at every turn, he’ll run into a dead-end. Excuse me. Debt-end.

Update: This post originally misspelled RNC Chairman Reince Priebus’ last name as “Preibus.” The post has been corrected above. Thanks to Brittany Cohan for calling it to my attention.