Mitt Romney's best option on Jeremiah Wright and race? Zipped lips

In the fury Thursday that greeted the leaking of a proposal that would try to taint Barack Obama by once again attaching him to the fiery sermons of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Mitt Romney botched his response with a "whatever" statement that will go down in the record books of political stumbles. One person said it was as if his mouth were falling down the stairs.

Whether or not billionaire Joe Ricketts of the Ending Spending Action Fund Super PAC had given a preliminary green light to the $10 million race-baiting proposal made little difference. By the end of the day, the Rev. Wright and the race issue had once again been brought to foreground. But not in the way the right-wingers planning for a big splash at the Democratic Convention were hoping. Instead of their proposal helping to weaken President Obama with a sneak attack three months down the road, the premature leak of its contents had diverted attention away from the economy, where the Romney camp sees Obama as vulnerable. Simultaneously, it provided the circumstances for Romney to upstage his worst previous stumble-tongue performance with a new worst-in-show.

Being compelled by the firestorm to repudiate the attack plan, the candidate drew attention to his own deficits as well as to the holes in the proposed attack on Obama itself. Romney's face-palm display also illustrated by implication the president's strengths both as a public speaker, who'whatever his policy flaws'connects with people at a personal level, and on the matter of race itself, where the president has, since his widely acclaimed Philadelphia speech in March 2008, boxed in the more obvious racists. As Conor Friedersdorf points out at The Atlantic:

Although hard core conservatives can't see it, President Obama is adept at talking about race in America. He's thought about the issue long enough to speak about it with simple words and sophisticated nuance. He invokes the best of America when telling the story of his life. He can tell a story about why he attended that church that makes white people listening feel good about their country and themselves. Mitt Romney cannot talk about race like that, nor does he benefit from an inquisition into how he could participate in his own faith given its flaws over the last five decades.

So it isn't just that Mitt Romney wants to be talking about the economy. It's that making an issue of Wright risk conversations about race and Mormonism, subjects Romney lacks the charisma to finesse, and that would be utter disasters if all his surrogates had to discuss them.

It wasn't just the awfulness of Romney's "whatever" meander in response to his own past linking of the Rev. Wright to Obama but also the tepidness of his overall response to the attack proposal that made Thursday a disastrous day for the GOP candidate. The Obama campaign lost no time in zeroing in on the reality that Romney failed to go anywhere near far enough in blasting a plan, which, in another line that will surely make it into the annals of campaign stupidity, says Obama has tried to characterize himself as a 'metrosexual Black Abe Lincoln.'

'Today, Mitt Romney had the opportunity to distance himself from his previous attempts to inject the divisive politics of character assassination into the presidential race,' said Obama spokesman Ben LaBolt in an email to reporters late Thursday. 'It was a moment that required moral leadership, and once again he didn't rise to the occasion.'

Because he can't.