Mitt Romney preps Bain counterattack

Mitt Romney poses for an Obama campaign ad Romneyland's hammer is about to drop...

The Romney campaign will begin to aggressively push back against President Obama's accusations that the Republican was an "outsourcing pioneer" today, a source privy to the the campaign's strategy told BuzzFeed.

...with a dull thud:

In a conference call Monday morning, senior staff said Romney's surrogates would stop shying away from the word "lie" in responding to Democrats' attacks on his business record, and plan to go on TV to call Obama a "liar," the source said.

"They are very fed up with these attacks," said the source.

Actually, I take it back. If that's the sound of Romney's hammer dropping, it's not even a dull thud. It's a total miss. Using the word "lie" and "liar" about President Obama aren't going to do a damn thing to ease Mitt's Bain pain.

According to the report, Romneyland also plans to say that Romney wasn't outsourcing overseas'that he was instead looking to increase U.S. exports. (I guess shipping American jobs to Singapore qualifies as an export, right?) And my personal favorite:

They will also argue that Romney had left Bain by the time much of this began.

So they are going to say that Bain was really doing great things ... and then add that Romney nonetheless had nothing to do with it? Even if Romney had truly left Bain (he hadn't), that sort of argument wouldn't pass the laugh test. Not only that, this argument is not even new: Romneyland has been trying to make this case all along. It hasn't worked for them so far, and there's no reason to expect that it will suddenly start working now.

Of course, if Romneyland really wants to make the case that Romney had nothing to do with Bain after 1999, well, maybe they could explain why Romney thinks that something he did 13 years ago qualifies him to be president. And maybe they could explain why he still earns $20-plus million per year from it.

And speaking of those millions, it's worth pointing out that even as Romney gears up to talk more Bain, the debate is shifting to Romney's remarkable secrecy about his tax returns and financial records. Maybe they'll finally get "fed up" about that debate too ... in about six weeks.