IF OBAMA HAD HAIR, WOULD ROMNEY WANT TO CHOP IT OFF?

The difference between Mitt Romney at prep school and Mitt Romney as an adult is, apparently, that these days he has people to do his harassment for him. His emotional age appears not to have changed:

Romney Campaign Bus Taunts Obama Supporters

Republican nominee Mitt Romney's guerrilla tactics continued Thursday, as the campaign bus circled the venue where President Barack Obama will be speaking this afternoon.

As it passed the assembled throngs of supporters awaiting entry to the event at Cuyahoga Community College, the bus honked its horn dozens of times, before circling around to do it again.....

As I said in my last post, I think a certain level of cockiness is impressive to the media types, and that results in better press coverage of the campaign. But this? This is punk stuff. This is just brattiness. It's not a sign of confidence. It's juvenile. It's going to be bad television if it was caught on video -- if I were, say, a swing-voting mothers, I'd think this was the work of poorly behaved overgrown children.

Josh Marshall understands why it's being done:

Remember, this isn't the first time something like this happened. A few weeks ago the Romney camp sent staffers to disrupt a press conference that Obama campaign strategist David Axelrod held in Boston to trash Romney....

The Romney camp has made a straightforward calculation that it can make up with appeals to the conservative id the ground it can't ever make up convincing anyone that Romney is really a right-wing ideologue.

... There's a deeply rooted sense on the right that Obama has been protected, coddled -- that no one has really taken it to him in a down and dirty way....

The Romney folks know that pretty much nobody -- not the Republican base or really anyone else -- is going to be convinced that the candidate is a down-the-line conservative. But he can appeal to them by playing the bad ass card, getting in Obama’s grill, disrespecting him....

But that's pathetic. It means Romney is still desperately seeking the love of the base, at a time when he should just be taking that as a given and trying to expand his base of base of support, by communicating with the center.

I don't think everyone with a mean streak is fundamentally insecure, but I think Romney is. I heard a clip of Romney this morning on the radio -- sorry, I can't find it -- in which he was whining about how you know what Obama will do in this campaign, he'll just utter all those nice, eloquent words ... and I realized that here's a guy who has everything, and who's always had everything, and he's still a bitter, resentful Nixon of a man, even though Nixon didn't have everything, so at least he had an excuse for being a bundle of resentments.

The famous bullying article depicted Romney as a guy who literally wanted to lash out at people he could mark as inferior even though he was a big man on campus at his prep school. This punk stuff his campaign is doing seems like more of the same: insecurity from an overdog.

Mitt, you made it. You're a success. You're rich. You have a lovely wife and family and have thrived in multiple careers. You have nothing to avenge. Get over it.