The Silence of Romney's Guns

Some people are complaining that Mitt Romney hasn't yet come out with a compelling narrative for his election.

There is Conrad Black, who wants more criticism of the mess of the Obama years:

It would be a national tragedy if we got all the way through what promises to be an exceptionally trying and vapid election campaign without a full airing of the president’s fishtailing and flip-flopping on all these and many other matters.

Or Matt Towery in an article on polling.  He is anxious to see how the Romneys will actually fight the election:

In the end, it is message, image and strategy that win the race -- and debates. For Romney, the message is not clear, and the image is still fuzzy. But he may have a strategy that is going to work.

 Meanwhile Karl Rove is raising the spectre of Fannie and Freddie.  He wants to remind us that seven years ago the Bushies tried to push a reform of Fannie and Freddie, but the Democrats in the Senate told the GOP that they would filibuster their reform bill.

Democrats opposed regulation in large part because the GSEs were an important source of funds for community groups allied with the Democratic Party, and they were run by Democratic power brokers like former Clinton Office of Management and Budget Director Franklin Raines and Walter Mondale's 1984 campaign chairman, James Johnson. And so the Bush reform died.

And the Obama administration still hasn't done anything about Fannie and Freddie.  They are moldering away in the back of the FHA, getting broker and broker with about $5 trillion in debt.  Think about what happens when that gets added to the national debt.

My guess is that the Romneys have a schedule and that all will be revealed when Romney gets back from his foreign tour and starts to ramp up for the Republican National Convention.  There will be a "message," there will be image-building, and there will be plenty of negative ads on the many failures and corruptions and tyrannies of the Obama administration.

But you really don't want to show your hand too early.  You don't want to give the Obamis time to prepare for a counterattack.  Also, we don't exactly know whether the economy gets worse between now and October or the European slow-motion death spiral turns into a maelstrom.

And there is this ancient piece of wisdom.  When your opponent is digging himself a hole, hand him a shovel.  Or Napoleon's advice: "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."

Given the number of unforced errors the Obama campaign has committed thus far in 2012, you really don't want to get in its way.