Mitt Romney tries to attack Obama on student debt despite his own poor record in Massachusetts

(Darren Hauck/Reuters) Sometimes you really have to wonder about Mitt Romney's campaign strategery. At a time when the Obama campaign is turning on the spotlight on Mitt's jobs record as Massachusetts governor, the Romney camp is practically jumping up and down pointing to another of Romney's giant weak spots from Massachusetts by trying to blame Obama for rising college tuitions and student loan debt. It's just not the shrewdest strategy to go after your opponent for those things when your own record is one of:

[...] dramatically slashing public higher education funding and hiking fees during his one term. According to the Boston Globe, fees and tuition jumped 63 percent at Massachusetts' once-stellar system of public higher education from 2003 to 2007, as Romney slashed state funding year after year, for a total of $140 million, or 14 percent, in four years. Not surprisingly, average student debt in Massachusetts jumped 25 percent while Romney was governor. Between 2001 and 2011, tuition and fees have more than doubled at the state's community colleges, state university and UMass campuses, but the bulk of the added burden piled up under Romney.

Romney's record is, in other words, ripe for a more fact-based rendition of exactly the attacks he's making on Obama. It's also not an isolated blip in Romney's vision of the economy, as Joan Walsh explains:

Under Reagan, median wages for the working and middle classes began to stagnate and fall ' but household debt began to rise. It was as if the GOP-unleashed private sector figured out how to make money lending families the money that they were no longer making in income. Republicans have the same approach to higher education: They slashed public funding, and then let their banker friends 'help' students afford higher tuition by lending them the cash to pay for it.

There's no reason to expect Romney will stick to attacks on President Obama that are reasonable or based in fact. You'd think he'd stick to ones that weren't likely to bite him in the ass, but then, maybe his problem is he doesn't have many of those'in fact, even without an Obama campaign response, Romney's big "Obama raised tuition" video has already been pulled for a copyright violation and drawn an annoyed response ("Considering I am not a supporter of Mitt Romney, this is not exactly sitting well with me") from one of the students featured in the video talking about his debt.