“In a bid to win independents, President Obama’s campaign is ramping up efforts to label Mitt Romney a hardcore conservative…

“The official described Romney as a conservative who wants to get rid of abortion and gay marriage and opposes the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to legal residency for children brought to the country as illegal immigrants. The official, mindful of Obama’s hope to win a large percentage of Hispanic voters, said Romney wants to deport all of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country…

“‘No one forced Mitt Romney to wrap his arms around the Tea Party and take the most extreme position on immigration of any candidate in modern history, but that is the platform he has decided to embrace throughout the campaign,’ said Jen Psaki, a former Obama aide.”

“Great things can grow out of stupid stories. Fehrnstrom jacked into an emerging, jokey conservative meme. It even had a hashtag: #ObamaDogReceipes. ‘John McCain’s presidential campaign wouldn’t have touched this anecdote with a ten-foot pole,’ wrote the National Review’s Jim Geraghty. ‘Between this and the Romney camp’s rapid response to the Rosen comments, we are seeing a Republican presidential campaign that is exponentially faster on its feet and way more nimble than the previous general-election campaign against Obama.’

“That was the point. Republican voters, the choosey people who made Romney survive three months of primaries, believe that Barack Obama won too easily in 2008. The media and the McCain campaign failed to ‘vet’ him. I heard iterations of the theory when South Carolina Republicans blew their kingmaker record and chose Newt Gingrich over Romney. Gingrich, they told me, would ‘eviscerate’ and ‘lacerate’ Obama. McCain? Poor guy had his chance, and he wimped out…

“Michael Goldfarb applauds the Romney campaign’s punch-back abilities—but only up to a point. ‘They’ve been attacked on the dog thing to an insane level,’ he says. ‘They get an opportunity, and they hit back. But both this and the Rosen thing were totally reactive. This was a response to the Seamus story, that was a response to the ‘war on women.’ You don’t see them going after character and bio, which were the things McCain was accused of going soft on.'”

“Romney is going to be a lot tougher on Obama than was McCain in 2008. For all the complaints against his moderation by the tea-party base, they will slowly rally to him as he makes arguments against Obama of the sort that McCain was perceived as unable or unwilling to make. So far Romney’s attitude is that he is in the arena where blows come thick and fast, and one can’t whine when being hit or hitting — a view far preferable to McCain’s lectures about what not to say or do in 2008. Left-wing preemptory charges that Romney is ‘swift-boating’ or ‘going negative’ will probably have slight effect on him. Just as Bill Clinton saw that Dukakis in 1988 had wanted to be liked rather than feared and so himself ran a quite different, tough 1992 race, so too Romney knows where McCain’s magnanimity got him in 2008. Romney won’t be liked by the press, knows it, and perhaps now welcomes it.”

“The idea that Obama has brought us out of the light when he’s plunged us deeper into the sinkhole of debt, that somehow Obama has opened up Washington DC to make it as transparent and open as possible when they’ve done all of these deals and subverted the rule of law behind close doors. That somehow Obama is more likable than any Republican and somehow he’s a nice guy – I hate hearing this from Mitt Romney, he’s got to get this talking point out of his mouth. Barack Obama is not a nice guy. He has dealt brutally with the Right, with people like Paul Ryan and brave Republicans who have been calling him to the carpet on all of the disgust and culture of corruption that has reigned.”