Mitt Romney, in a sign that he is comfortable as the early-state frontrunner, aims to up his national profile by aggressively bracketing the Democratic presidential candidates over the next few weeks, aides said this weekend.
The campaign hopes the regular reproaches will be seen as signs of confidence and strength and will help to reduce the friction that prevents Romney from being seen as the leader of the Republican pack. His national poll ratings regularly lag those of his better-known rivals.
Aside from the benefit to his own candidacy, Romney's aides are worried that Republicans generally aren't doing enough to soften up the Democrats most likely to be their party's nominee.
On the trail, Romney will spend a little more time analyzing "The Romney vision versus the Democrat vision," according to one aide. He will compare his proposals -- metaphorically, a three-legged stool of strong families, strong national defense and a strong economies, to what he'll call a comparatively shaky and liberal grounding of the Democrats' proposals, the aide said.
Romney regularly compares Hillary Clinton's economic philosophy to Karl Marx's. This weekend, he said America wasn't read to take a "left turn" and "follow Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Barack Obama." He continued: "Their solutions are Big Brother, big taxes, and big government, and that is not the right answer for America."
In recent days, Romney has begun to elaborate. He called Clinton's "course" one where "government manages your life." The Republican course, he said, is "let the individual and personal responsibility lead and guide."
In a more personal poke, Romney said Clinton "wouldn't be elected president of France today, never mind the United States." [French bashing is still cool, apparently, even though the voters there just elected a (sort of) conservative and Romney has spent more time in the country than all of the Democrats combined.]
On health care, Romney will try to damn Barack Obama with faint praise, saying this weekend that "at least Barack Obama had the "courage to admit that his plan means higher taxes." He also jumped on Obama's remarks last week at a Planned Parenthood conference that it was OK to teach age-appropriate sex ed to kindergarteners, a characterization that Obama said masks the more nuanced reality of his record.
Though the media counter-attacked, pointing out that the Massachusetts sex-ed curriculum under Romney included plenty of non-conservative teachings, Romney's campaign professed to be pleased by how conservative activists responded to the controversy. They dismissed the attempts to bring attention to Romney's ideological evolution as unsound. But this weekend in New Hampshire, Romney again made the contrast, suggesting that the campaign believed the comparison was sound.
Though Romney has called for a new course in the country's approach to terrorism, he has lambasted Edwards for saying the "War on Terror" phrase is "just a bumper sticker."
Rudy Giuliani and John McCain have both picked spots to attack Democrats and have, as of late, stepped up their rhetoric.
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