Mitt's Money

David Weigel asks if the Obama campaign can successfully project Romney as a corporate villain:

“When people think about who’s rich, who’s successful, they think of two archetypes,” says Priorities USA Action adviser Paul Begala. “The predominant one—he’s probably a smart guy. He probably earned it. That’s Bill Gates, that’s Steve Jobs. The other archetype is Gordon Gekko.”

So Romney was Gekko-ized. The risks of alienating other wealthy people, who might take this personally, were limited. Those people had turned on Obama years ago, telling reporters they were being scapegoated as “fat cats.” If the Obama campaign could give a microphone to only one of the people who made the Romney/Koch fundraiser, it might be Sharon Zambrelli, who told the Los Angeles Times what a disappointment Obama was after “all of Wall Street” wrote him checks. Romney has begun out-fundraising Obama. How do you shame him for that? Stuff the bags of money with blue paint bombs.

Remember Nicholas Shaxson's takedown of Romney's offshore banking accounts in the pages of Vanity Fair? Four days after it was published, Weigel points out, the party faithful were keen to plug it on the Sunday talk shows. Maryland governor Martin O’Malley quipped, "I've never known of a Swiss bank account to build an American bridge." It's a very small part of a very large campaign to recast Romney as a greedy corporate titan, and an expert outsourcer of American jobs whose pre-political livelihood depended on depriving ordinary, hard-working Americans of theirs.

Of course, it's a fairly anodyne move — a safe strategy for the Obama campaign. For the Romney camp, it's a difficult image to combat. If Obama's people can spin Romney correctly, they can perhaps sufficiently offset the drastic loss of their candidate's fashionable cool.