Romney:Angry as Dukakis:Tank

So how does Mitt Romney follow up yesterday's meltdown, in which he accused the nation's first African-American President of "divisiveness based upon...ethnicity"? And said "The president seems to be running just to hang on to power"? And complained that the Obama campaign is "all about division and attack and hatred"?

He follows it up with...a petition!

(At first glance I thought that said "Division of Anger and Hate", and wondered if that would be a cabinet-level post in Romney's White House.)

President Obama's campaign and his surrogates have made wild and reckless accusations that disgrace the office of the Presidency. Another outrageous charge came yesterday in Virginia. And the White House sinks a little bit lower.

This is what an angry and desperate Presidency looks like.

President Obama knows better and promised better; and America deserves better.

Sign the petition¹ if you agree President Obama should take his campaign of division and anger and hate back to Chicago².

I have to give the Romney campaign their due: they have come up with, hands down, the least badass move by any campaign in any election anywhere ever. There are various tones that can be effective in a campaign (combative, optimistic, faux-reasonable, above-it-all) but plaintive isn't one of them. The guy who said there's no whining in politics is running a campaign that consists entirely of whining.

One might be tempted to ask: if he loses his shit at the kind of criticism he's getting now, how on earth could he cope with the endless and overwhelming barrage of attacks he would get as president?

But the thing is, that's who Mitt is. His overweening sense of entitlement (after all, it is his turn) renders him incapable of sustaining criticism from people he considers his inferiors. He can dish it out, of course (because they deserve it!), but good god can he ever not take it. He can't take it because, deep down, he believes he shouldn't have to.

Mitt's petulance may actually play well among the wingnuts since, hey, their anger comes from entitlement as well. Outside the wingnut base, though, I doubt that anyone would see that petition (a petition! Obama is quaking in his boots!) as anything other than an ineffectual little joke.

¹I haven't decided what name to sign it in; it's down to either "Haywood Jablomi" or "Mitt Zaduchkanu".

²I'm told by reliable sources that Chicago has a sizable African-American population...which of course has nothing at all to do with the wording of the petition.