"I think he's a nice guy. I'm sure he loves the country and wants it to do well," Romney told a crowd in New Hampshire earlier this month. "I just don't think he understands the principles that make us who we are.''To hear former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.) tell it, however, Obama is actually quite competent. But that's the problem: Gingrich says Obama is a leftist "radical," using his considerable political skills to undermine treasured American values.
Those two views are not mutually exclusive, you know. He could be an incompetent Marxist.
In their disparate portraits of Obama, the GOP's two leading candidates have revealed something important about themselves.
Not themselves, you moron - their political approach, maybe.
Romney is trying to reach a general-election audience, including many people who voted for Obama in 2008 and still like him personally. So he casts the president as an honest mistake, a low performer who simply needs to be replaced.
That's one good reason to vote for Anyone But Obama.
Gingrich, by contrast, is aiming at a Republican primary electorate that never liked Obama much to begin with. So he portrays the president as the representative of a whole poisoned way of thinking: an adversary who needs to be not just defeated, but repudiated.
And that's a second good reason for the rest of us.
Saturday's results in South Carolina -- and Romney's own recent shifts toward more belligerent language -- seem to indicate that Gingrich's approach might be working better now.
"When Romney attacks Obama, he says, you know, 'He said he was going to create jobs. And he didn't. He's lost jobs. He said he was going to do this, and he didn't.' It's very operational," said Lynn Vavreck, a professor at UCLA who studies presidential campaigns.
"Gingrich is basically saying that, 'This is a war for the future of America, between my vision and Obama's vision,'" Vavreck said. "And that, I think, is a much better message than the Romney message."
Which is not to say that Mitt has no arrows in his quiver.
Romney has also attacked Obama for being weak in foreign-policy tussles with Iran and Russia. He also has accused the president for looking to the social-welfare states of European countries for inspiration -- trying to turn the United States "into a European-style entitlement society."
Also true, but much of the country can't seem to get past the pocketbook issues - at least according to the MSM.