Why Mitt’s Trying to Beat up on Joe Biden

Just posted at the Plum Line: this really excellent political opinion column by Jamell Bouie. He gives an answer as to why Mitt has over the past 24 hours tried to blow up Joe Biden’s ‘chains’ remark into such a big deal: it’s cause he’s trailing in the election, by all reliable measures. “Losing” is Boulee’s word.

Borrowing an outlook from sports, I believe that if the campaign gets into the third quarter of the race (after Labor Day, after the autumn solstice) with current trends still favoring the president continuing, the professional political operatives on board the Romney team are going to need a series of Hail Mary passes to somehow get their candidate back in to the contest. With Mitt often being his own campaign manager, I’d say it’s him driving the over the top push-back against Biden, and continuing to air ads like the one falsely asserting Pres. Obama’s ruined the welfare law. Mitt himself may have written the fervid speech he game late last night, the one raising dungeon about Pres. Obama’s character, the one the Obama campaign this morning called “unhinged.” Bouie points out that one of the underpinnings within the Romney camp has been their presumed advantage with senior voters, but the Ryan pick is threatening to erode that big time. If so, pop goes one of the legs on their 3-legged stool.

As for the Obama camp’s response to the convenient outrage over Biden’s use of a loaded word, and their response to things like the welfare ad, I think they’re doing it right. Basically, they’ve made it clear they’re not having any crap, and they won’t be instructed by an opponent whose policies would damage the middle class–the big banks, the new shacklers that Biden was talking about–and which has been making stuff up about the president since their first TV ad.

The Plum Line, where Greg Sargent and Jonathan Bernstein also post, is one of my steady political reads on the Web