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"Congratulations, politics junkies: you've got a campaign on your hands at last. The furor that arose at the end of last week over Romney's Bain involvements\u2014and his representations of same\u2014constitute some of the first real blood-letting of the presidential season. There's a lot we don't know about how things will play out and what the campaigns are saying and thinking internally, but this seems like a good occasion to indulge in some educated speculation. Here's what we think we can glean:\n\n 1. The best attacks tie into other attacks. \n\n\n\n When the Boston Globe piece that ignited this story landed on Thursday morning, The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza (a GQ alum, we'd like to note) tweeted the following: \"This BG article is direct torpedo 2 hull of Romney campaign. May be experiencing his version of O's Rev. Wright moment.\" He's right. The Jeremiah Wright ugliness was so damaging to Obama not just because of the immediate questions it raised\u2014Were you or weren't you in the sanctuary when he said X? Do you repudiate him?\u2014but because it tied into the broader, more thematic attack on Obama that he was some kind of alien with different, dangerous values.\n\nSimilarly, this Bain stewardship story raises immediate questions\u2014Did you attend board meetings during that time? Why were you compensated during the post-1999 years if you weren't involved?\u2014as well as broader ones into questions about Romney's off-shore investments, his record as an outsourcer, and his refusal to release any tax returns before 2011. Remember that hackneyed line about how you have to define your opponent before he defines you? That's what you're seeing in action right now.\n\nNotice that the Romney campaign has failed to rebut any of the central facts in the Globe story and its follow-ons. They don't appear to have an answer\u2014yet\u2014as to how one can be president and sole shareholder of a company without being responsible for its actions. They don't have an answer as to why Romney had a Swiss bank account and investments in the Caymans. And it's unlikely that either charge can be explained away without releasing those tax returns, which Romney again said he won't do. Which just means that it will continue to be a tantalizing question for journalists and oppo researchers, and, more importantly, that perceptions of Romney as a corporate baron with something to hide may begin to congeal.\n\nStill, it may be that there's something so ugly in the tax returns that it's worth it for Romney to take the abuse. As conservative Commentator George Will put it on Sunday, \"The costs of not releasing the returns are clear. Therefore, he must have calculated that there are higher costs in releasing them.\"\n\n 2. Romney is putting his chips on cronyism.\n\n\n\n Modern-day campaigns invest serious resources in polling, conducting exhaustive research about how different potential messages play among different constituencies and in key states. The reams of findings are the truest picture of where the race stands\u2014but unfortunately the campaigns almost never release the actual unvarnished data (\"polling memos\" like the one Romney released today are generally massaged or cherry-picked to rebut a public narrative). But on a day like today, when Romney is desperate to change the subject and start hitting back at the Democrats, we can surmise that whatever message he turns to is the one his internals show offering the best chance at counter-defining Obama. That message, evidently, is cronyism. Romney hit the theme in a Fox News interview this morning, and the campaign held a conference call this afternoon to keep pounding. This, presumably, is the same reason why attacking Obama on Solyndra was Romney's first message after clinching the nomination: his campaign thinks it's his best shot at chipping away at perceptions of Obama as likeable, if not necessarily a super-hero. The problem with this attack, so far, is that voters already know who Obama is, and painting him as a Tammany-style backroom dealer is going to require a lot of spadework. And who knows\u2014they may yet see a breakthrough on this one. It's probably wise to try, at least.\n\n 3. The bell that hasn't rung. Keep in mind that in the general election we've seen next to nothing in attacks on Romney as a flip-flopper, which is kind of extraordinary when you think about it. For years, all that anyone outside of Massachusetts knew about Romney was that he's a serial waffler who's been on both sides of such high-voltage issues as health care mandates, abortion, man-made climate change, assault-weapons bans, TARP, the auto bailout, etc. And while his GOP opponents in the primary attacked him for changing positions, the Obama team has so far chosen to portray him as secretive, out-of-touch, and in love with dismantling America's industrial heartland. Emphasis on so far. Politicos generally consider Labor Day to be the start of the real campaign, the point when voters finally start tuning in. If we're spending the notoriously slow summer months talking about Romney's business record, it may not be far-fetched to assume that Team Obama is saving the flip-flopper attack for Autumn. Although, considering how well the Bain offensive is going, it's possible they won't have to.\n\nRead more on Death Race 2012\n\nHunger Reads: Which Presidential Candidate is Winning the Visibility Contest and What's in the Political Journalist's Canon\n\nToday's Political Firestorm: Condi as VP?\n\nHunger Reads: GQ's Jason Zengerle on His Favorite Political Reads\n\nWhat To Do When The Hate Starts: The GQ Guide to Being Booed\n\n Follow Reid Cherlin on Twitter for more updates from the campaign trail."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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