The Romney campaign plans an all-out attack on President Obama's pre-public-life biography, according to TPM.
Pot, cocaine, white girlfriends, communism, etc., are sure to come up, as they have on Republican radio.
Romney surrogates like John Sununu have launched initial salvos in that battle.
Sununu, while trying to defend Romney as a job-creating capitalist, said this about young Obama:
He has no idea how the American system functions, and we shouldn't be surprised about that, because he spent his early years in Hawaii smoking something, spent the next set of years in Indonesia, another set of years in Indonesia.
An anonymous Romney aide told Buzzfeed that:
they plan to step up their game, possibly including attacks on Obama’s biography that have up to this point been solely the domain of right-wing media.
“I mean, this is a guy who admitted to cocaine use, had a sweetheart deal with his house in Chicago, and was associated and worked with Rod Blagojevich to get Valerie Jarrett appointed to the Senate,” one Romney adviser told Buzzfeed. “The bottom line is there’ll be counterattacks.”
Perhaps the Romney campaign is smarting from the revelations, so far, of young Mitt the bully, the draft evader, the police impersonator, the liar about a deadly car crash in France, and the adult who said nothing about Mormon racism when it might have counted.
More, below.
All of the above revelations, most of them relatively recent and not yet the subject of campaign ads, are related to Romney's exalted position as a rich, connected Mormon kid.
He bullied and assaulted a gay classmate, and got away with it. Romney was the son of the governor, the bullied/assaulted kid was not.
During the height of the Vietnam War draft, Romney conveniently spent more than two years in France as a Mormon missionary.
While there, he drove the wrong way on a small-town road and caused a head-on collision that killed one person in his car. He lied that a "drunk priest" (Bishop Jean Vilnet, who was not drunk but was seriously injured by the negligent Mormon draft evader) caused the fatal accident.
The police-impersonator story is either another harmless young Mitt prank, or a sign that Romney likes to dominate and humiliate people, even his own family, on vacation at his NH lakefront estate.
Romney's church, which has been an essential element of his political and business success, did not recognize black men as full members (two levels of priesthood, consecrated in a secret temple ceremony) until 1978.
When Mitt Romney was 31 years old.
There is, AFAIK, no public record of Romney opposing the Mormon church's racism, prior to 1978.
Likewise, the Romney of 2012 fully supports the ultra-conservative agenda (both social and economic) of the old white Utah men who rule the Mormon enterprise.
And who Romney swore to obey.
Most voters don't know these facts about young Mitt Romney.
Many of them will by Election Day.