Why Obama would trounce Romney

(Image credit: Pool/Getty Images, REUTERS/Steve Marcus/Las Vegas Sun)

last updated 8 January 2015

Team Obama must be giddy, says former George W. Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer at The Daily Beast. Among GOP presidential hopefuls, Tim Pawlenty has faded, overshadowed by long-shot candidates Herman Cain and Rick Santorum in last week's debate. Newt Gingrich has imploded with a stunning "gaffe-o-lympics." That leaves Mitt Romney — "he of the perfect family, perfect teeth, and perfect hair" — the only person in the GOP who makes the professorial Obama look like a regular guy. The Rombot comes off as someone who doesn't really believe his "unthinking 'less government' mantra," writes Latimer — he just repeats it because his fancy consultants tell him it plays well with focus groups. Here, an excerpt:

Romney undoubtedly is a smart, well-meaning person, but he still comes off as the candidate who refuses to blow his nose until it has been sketched out days earlier with overpaid consultants, put before three separate focus groups, and only tended to by tissue paper made in Iowa or New Hampshire....

Team Obama has to be lighting candles every day for a gift like this. Romney will prove so predictable, so calculated, so filled with everything money can buy but ideas that the White House can already plot out his every utterance — all the way from his love of ethanol in Iowa to his gauzy Reagan-invoking ads in New Hampshire to his selection of Huckabee as a running mate to his short, gracious concession speech on election night, his hair immobile in the gentle Massachusetts wind.