Roger Simon at Politico: Mitt is down; out looms next

This is from Roger Simon at Politico:

The wheels are not coming off the Mitt Romney campaign. They came off some time ago. The press is just beginning to notice.

The Romney campaign is skidding along on its axles and scraping its muffler. Soon it will be down to the dog on the roof.

I hate to say I told you so. No, scratch that. I love to say I told you so. I just don’t get to do it very often.

But as I have been saying for a while now, Mitt Romney is a deeply flawed candidate who got the Republican nomination by beating a ludicrously weak field. Don’t believe me?

You know who came in second? Rick Santorum. Newt Gingrich was third, and Ron Paul was fourth. That’s not a field; that’s a therapy group.

Romney’s defects as a nominee, which I will get to in a moment, were obvious, but considered unimportant because he really did not have to attract voters. Instead, voters would flock to him.

They would be driven to him by a bad economy and a lack of jobs, jobs, jobs. The latter was the Romney campaign’s magical incantation that would make up for any of its own faults and deficiencies.

[....]

Jobs, jobs, jobs, the Romney team chanted. That would solve everything. That would make voters desert Obama in droves. And it did not matter that the evidence suggested otherwise. Unemployment has been above 8 percent for every month of the Obama campaign and he has beaten Romney in the polls in every month of his campaign.

With its tunnel vision, the Romney campaign assumed an economic downturn would mean Americans would want to elect a businessman to the presidency.

Yet the economic downturn was caused in part by shady business practices, runaway greed and outright dishonesty at the highest reaches of America’s corporate community. Did Americans really want to elect the guy on the cover of the Monopoly box or throw him in jail?

This is just ouch! Ouch!! OUCH!!! Simon has pretty much ripped a new one into Mitt Romney here. Read the rest of the story.