Mitt on the Defensive

No question about it; it's early days, and it's impossible to predict what may come up that could turn the presidential race on its head. But based on what's going on right now, it's hard not to see Obama as doing a much better job than Romney in connecting with ordinary voters.

Ian Masters was interviewing James Kloppenburg yesterday on this subject, and Kloppenburg remarked that we should expect the Romney campaign to come out with a major offensive to try to counter a very, very bad week last week. But today we get "Hey, Kerry's wife didn't release her tax returns and McCain only released two years!"  (Not true: McCain in '04 released 23 years of tax returns; and Teresa Heinz Kerry did release some tax information in '04, but the point is how lame this sounds, and how the more he complains about having to release more information, the more he creates the suspicion that he really does have something to hide).

Something else Kloppenburg said rings true: different context, but this is starting to sound like the shrill denials Nixon gave on Watergate. And even Romney has himself said on more than one occasion, if you're defending, you're losing. 

We can't get overconfident, but all this is good news for Team Democratic and Team Obama, no doubt about it.