Here's Mitt Romney, giving up on the foreign policy front and returning to domestic issues:

“Who would’ve guessed we’d look back at the Carter years as the good ol' days?”

The Romney campaign is really going all-in on these Carter references. It's a bad idea on two fronts. First: Younger voters don't care. The youngest possible Reagan voter in 1980 will turn 50 this year. Second: People who are old enough to remember the Carter Administration (or are inspired enough to research the Carter Administration) know that the Obama Administration bears no resemblance to the Carter years.

This is part of the Romney team's attempts to paint President Obama as a clueless bumbler. That's bad strategy. It echoes the common Democratic sentiment of last decade: Somehow, George W. Bush was supposed to be a clueless child who couldn't even put on his own clothes in the morning while simultaneously masterminding the cynical erosion of our civil liberties? That's terrible messaging, and the attempts to compromise and paint Dick Cheney as the real power behind the throne weren't enough to compensate for that terrible messaging. The best way for the Romney team to attack Obama would be to drop the Carter stuff immediately, and find something not as insane as Gingrich's Obama-is-a-socialist-who-is-transforming-the-nation-into-something-unrecognizable schtick. You know, something that would portray what Romney probably perceives as the reality of the situation. Instead, they're going to vacillate between these two poles of hyper-competent socialist supervillain and total idiot, which is not the way to coax independents to your side.