It’s not just the frequency with which Jon Huntsman’s campaign goes after Mitt Romney that’s interesting; it’s how good Huntsman is at doing it.
Last week, the former Utah governor slammed Romney as a “perfectly lubricated weathervane,” followed soon after by a brutal video highlighting some of the former Massachusetts governor’s recent flip-flops. On screen is a flipping toy monkey.
Yesterday afternoon, Huntsman’s team hit Romney on this again.
It’s another split-screen clip, showing Romney taking both sides of debates over health care, stimulus, withdrawal from Iraq, climate change, and taxes. All the while, Romney, has flips and flops, shares the screen with a turning weathervane (which, presumably, is perfectly lubricated).
It’s a 90-second video, the last 20 of which shows Huntsman talking about Romney’s failure to show leadership. But perhaps the best part about the clip is that the first 70 seconds are so strong, they could be used by anyone, in either party, without so much as an edit.
As Rachel Maddow noted yesterday, it’s a video with an indefinite lifespan — “every other candidate can just pop themselves in at the end.”
To reiterate a point from last week, Romney seems to have two main flaws as a candidate. He’s a cowardly and uncontrollable flip-flopper with no core convictions, and he has an atrocious record on job creation. I’d argue that Huntsman is hitting Romney on both counts more effectively than anyone in either party.
If Democrats — Obama’s re-election team, the DNC, allied super PACs, etc. — are smart, they’re taking note at what Huntsman is up to. Huntsman almost certainly won’t be the Republican nominee, but his content should probably be used again in 2012.
