This Republican response to Romney's bullying is weirdly anachronistic. Here's Erick Erickson, who was definitely never bullied because of his name:

Mitt Romney cut a hippy's hair at his preparatory high school...Let's leave out the fact that the kid who got his haircut was subsequently thrown out of school for smoking one cigarette, but we're to believe that the assailants of his hair, witnessed by many, were ignored. Oh, and the guy who got is hair cut never, ever, ever mentioned it, including to family, and died in 2004 so it can't be verified.

Imagine that. A kid who was bullied didn't talk about his bullying with his family. That never happens. This reminds me of a terrible comment I saw on a right-leaning post about the bullying on Beltway Confidential this morning:

If the kid was gay and he was obviously trying to rub it in everyone's face then MItt did the right thing to cut his hair and let him know how to act.

The more I see responses like this, the more I think the Obama campaign's current choice of a slogan—"Forward"—is a good one. The Republican response to almost everything is to evoke the past—Ronald Reagan, cheering on assaults of hippies, trying to hearken back to the terrible old days when everyone pretended that gay people didn't exist—and the past doesn't sell like it used to. Ronald Reagan could run on a platform of trying to turn 1980s America into 1950s America, because Ronald Reagan was running in a time when many voters were nostalgic for the 1950s. The 1950s aren't even in this millenium, and nostalgia for that era doesn't have the same kind of power that it used to. Running on the past is a losing proposition, but it's all that the modern Republican Party has.