A rep from the Romney campaign called me yesterday to point out that Romney’s not the only one attacking another candidate. He cited McCain’s web ads in particular but also said the attacks were coming from surrogates. It’s true that McCain’s jabs at Romney are not getting the same coverage as Romney’s jabs at McCain. (Even the liberal Media Matters agrees!) The McCain people have a simple explanation for why their ads don’t deserve the same level of scrutiny: “They don’t misrepresent Mitt Romney’s record.” True enough, in that they use Romney’s own statements, and the statements of editorial boards. In this way, they avoid confronting Mitt Romney’s record directly entirely, hiding behind third parties. It is harder to find an untruth in those ads, but that doesn’t make them dispassionate analyses.
And last night may turn out to be problematic for McCain. While his barbs were funny, wry irony is not a quality one associates with the Commander-in-Chief. Today, his aides are positively giddy… if that morphs into snideness, well…. New Hampshirites dislike “sore winners” almost as much as they like underdogs.