Mitt Romney has come out swinging against Rick Perry as a career politician in an attempt to discredit Perry with Tea Party activists.  That’s a fair point; Perry’s long public-sector tenure represents one of the big issues that conservative grassroots have with establishment Republicans.  It’s up to Perry to demonstrate that he doesn’t fit in that pigeonhole.  Romney even created a website, CareerPolitician.com, as a platform for pressuring Perry on his lack of private-sector experience.

However, as National Journal reported last night, the site itself says something about its owner, too:

Mitt Romney‘s campaign proudly touted the launch of careerpolitician.com Thursday, a website attacks Texas Gov. Rick Perry‘s record. While the Romney campaign announced careerpolitician.com as new website, a review of the site’s registration reveals that its owner in fact registered the domain name several years ago.

According to the GoDaddy.com registration of the domain name, careerpolitician.com, was purchased on March 24th, 2007 and expires on that date in 2013. The registry was recently updated on Sept. 8th, 2011.

So the man criticizing Perry as a “career politician” has been holding the domain name for this particular attack for more than four years.  In fact, the owner held it long before anyone thought of Perry as a potential contender.  That sounds an awful lot like a man who spent the last four years running for President, does it not?  Plus, it’s also fair to point out that Romney was running for federal office in 1994, when he challenged Ted Kennedy for his seat in Massachusetts, before winning the gubernatorial election in 2002 and President in 2007-8.  The only reason Romney hasn’t spent the last seventeen years as a politician is because he lost two of those three elections.

Christopher Peleo-Lazar speculates that Romney might have wanted to use CareerPolitician.com against John McCain or Sam Brownback in 2007-8, but neither make a lot of sense.  Brownback was never a factor in that cycle, and McCain’s record as a war hero would make that argument weak.  I’d bet that it was actually intended for Mike Huckabee, an opponent with whom Romney had feuded in a similar manner as Romney has with Perry.

As more of an aside, does Romney really use GoDaddy for his website needs?  Has anyone on Team Romney watched their soft-porn advertising?  Way to woo the family-values vote, guys.