Democrats ready to face Romney

As James said yesterday, Mitt Romney is well on the way to becoming the Republican nominee. He is virtually certain to win New Hampshire on Tuesday – Nate Silver’s projections give him a 99 per cent chance of victory – and he’s odds on in South Carolina and Florida too, which would give him a clean sweep of the January primaries. It’s not the outcome Team Obama were hoping for – they’d have had a much easier ride against just about any of the other candidates (save perhaps Jon Huntsman) – but it is the one they were expecting. As a result, they’re ready for him, and Romney’s already been the focus of Democrat attacks for several months.

The Democrats’ favourite charge is that Mitt’s a ‘flip-flopper’ – after all, they remember how potent an attack it was against John Kerry eight years ago. In October, they set up WhichMitt.com chronicling his changing positions on issues such as abortion and health care reform. A few weeks later, they followed it up with MittvMitt.com, ‘The story of two men trapped in one body’. And, to accompany John McCain’s endorsement of Romney on Wednesday, they put together a video of McCain’s 2008 attacks on Romney’s flip-flopping. While the Democrats’ video-makers are obviously having a lot of fun with this, there is a danger that it reminds independents of Romney’s more moderate, less ideological side.

Another line of attack is that Romney is ‘out of touch’. The Democrat-supporting group ’Americans United for Change’ has set up the mock campaign site ‘Romney-Gekko 2012’, portraying Romney as a greed-driven investment banker in the style of Michael Douglas’ Wall Street character. They even released an ‘It’s morning again on Wall Street’ ad to go with it. Romney added fuel to this fire with his ‘$10,000 bet’ in last month’s Republican debate.

More substantively, the Democrats are also going after Romney’s jobs record, both in his time as Governor of Massachusetts (when it ranked 47th of the 50 states in job creation) and in his earlier private equity career at Bain Capital. In a memo released today, the Democratic National Committee says:

‘Let’s remember that as the head of Bain Capital, Mitt Romney made any number of profit-based business decisions that led to firing thousands of workers, closing plants, bankrupting American companies and outsourcing jobs overseas.’