THERE'S A NEW LIBERAL IN THE RACE!

Josh Marshall posts the trailer from a new documentary attacking Mitt Romney; the rights to the film have been purchased by the pro-Gingrich super-PAC, Winning Our Future, which has just received a $5 million cash infusion from billionaire Sheldon Adelson.

I can't see how Gingrich and Adelson could have gotten what they paid for. Watch the trailer. No, let me say that again: Watch the trailer and imagine you're a Republican voter. Imagine you watch Fox News incessantly, and listen to Limbaugh and all the Limbaugh wannabes. Imagine you buy all those damn books the right-wing blowhards put out. How do you react to this?





I don't care how much "capitalism is great, but..." talk prefaces these attacks on Romney's record at Bain -- it's not going to impress Republicans. It's only going to infuriate them. I think this material is much more likely to rally GOP voters to Romney's side.

Thomas Frank has been plugging his new book Pity the Billionaires recently, and one of the points he's been making is that right-wingers think capitalism is perfect. They think it's part of nature -- in other words, they think it was created by God. They love capitalism. They think its punishments are God's punishments of the unworthy.

Maybe I could see this working in New Hampshire -- maybe. But, according to The New York Times, the documentary is going to be cut up into ads that are going to play in South Carolina, where the Republicans are really Republican.

I know that some winger politicians and consultants, like a lot of mainstream pundits, misread the tea party mindset and think the voter base hates evil fat-cat capitalists as much as they hate "big" government. Rick Perry has occasionally made arguments suggesting that he believes this. (And what do you know -- the Times says that Barry Bennett, a onetime consultant to a pro-Perry super PAC, was the guy who got this project rolling in the first place. Bennett has solid right-wing credentials -- former staffer to loony-right congresswoman Jean Schmidt, partner to Mary Cheney, proponent of union-busting SB5 in Ohio -- but he's completely out of tune with the GOP zeitgeist here.)

Now, the Bain stuff will hurt Mitt Romney in the general election -- if the Obama campaign deploys it correctly. I think there's a reasonably good chance it will be deployed correctly. But putting it out there now does Romney no harm -- and it's going to get Gingrich tarred as a RINO.

The only sense I see in this from a right-wing perspective, apart from the fact that it encourages Romney to hone his Bain talking points, is that it has the potential to make Bain seem like old news by the time of the general election. But it really won't be old news, because it'll be fresh for swing voters in the fall, if Team Obama addresses the issue the right way. So, for now, this is good news (or at least not bad news) for Romney.