For reasons I can't quit figure out, the Obama campaign seems to be passing up a golden opportunity to define Mitt Romney as the second coming of George W. Bush. The campaign has thus far done a good job of defining Romney as a heartless oligarch, a ruthless job destroyer, a tax-avoider and an embodiement of the 1%. What they haven't done quite so successfully is to paint his possible administration as Bush-on-steriods - more tax cuts for the wealthy, more deregulation, more macho-swagger foreign policy, more expansion of the military industrial complex, more wars. They've run on this theme to be sure, but Bush himself has been conspicuously absent from the message.
How many times in past campaigns have we seen the "morphing ads," you know the ones that show one particularly egregious figure magically dissolving into someone running for office, thereby inextricably tying the two of them together in the minds of the voters? Where are those ads in this election?
The very sight of George W. Bush's face (and let's throw Cheney in there as well) elicits a queasy visceral response on the part of many voters even to this day. I think Bush needs to be tied to Romney like an anchor. There should not be a single ad from today forward that doesn't feature Bush as a prominant part of it.
Maybe it's some kind of unwritten code that presidents and vice presidents don't speak ill of other presidents who are no longer in office. But that needs to change. It's Bush who got us into this mess, and it's Obama who's trying to get us out of it - yet he's the one getting blamed for it as if it were somehow his fault.
In fact, I'll bet that the Romney campaign has spent more time comparing Obama to Carter than the Obama campaign has spent comparing Romney to Bush.
The time for subtelty and following the Queen of Marbury Rules is long past. It's time to take off the gloves and show America what a real Romney presidency would look like. After all, we've lived through it all once before - and it wasn't pretty.
I get why the Romney campaign doesn't want to acknowledge Bush's existence. I don't understand why the Obama campaign appears to be doing the same.