If the Obama campaign is going to harp on Bain Capital's handful of failures -- several of which happened after Mitt Romney left the company -- they'd better be prepared to handle scrutiny of President Obama's gross mishandling of taxpayer money. The RNC has been bludgeoning Obama for his awful public investment record, which includes billions doled out to political allies, only to be flushed down the proverbial toilet. Their latest focuses on Solyndra, a particularly egregious case:
What's the president's answer to this? Pretending that it wasn't his program "per se" isn't going to fly. Let's recall how this question reduced the White House spokesman to reciting unresponsive jibberish earlier in the week:
By all means, Team Obama, keep pressing on this point. The Romney camp is ready to respond in kind, and has a tranche of your own supporters denouncing your tacky and misleading attacks on Romney's "superb" private sector record. The latest line of criticism Axelrod is planning to roll out is slamming Romney's jobs record in Massachusetts. They'll argue that under Governor Romney, the state had one of the slowest rates of job growth in the nation. As Jim Geraghty points out, they'll have to warn about those dark days when Massachusetts jobless rate fell from 5.6 to 4.7 percent under Romney. The horror. And once again, there will be no shortage of rebuttal material, from the last few days alone. I'll leave you with two polls. The first, from WaPo and ABC News -- with its absurd pro-Democrat sample -- shows Romney "rebounding" with women and independents (this stuff certainly can't hurt). The second is a slate of swing state polls from NBC. This race is tied in Iowa, Colorado, and Nevada. Barack Obama swept those battlegrounds in 2008.
UPDATE - Via the Romney campaign, a side-by-side comparison of Obama v Romney on budgets, unemployment and growth. Not too flattering for The One. Keep in mind that Romney had to contend with an 85 percent hostile legislature, whereas Obama had large majorities (including a seven-month supermajority) in both houses of Congress for the first two years of his term.