ElsieElsie over at the GOS gets into it:

The President’s campaign knows Romney’s folks don’t want to talk about his time as Massachusetts governor because that leads to discussion of Romneycare, and they enjoyed the benefit of Romney’s stumble and faceplant after the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act. This leaves Romney’s one option – to pivot to his business experience. The Obama campaign was ready and tripped Romney mid-pivot. In the process of the Romney campaign’s flailing before national doubt and ridicule, the President’s campaign has effectively charged up his base, frustrated and depressed the GOP base, and inserted doubt into the swing voter’s mind about Romney. If the GOP candidate can’t run on governing Massachusetts, and can’t run on his Bain record, and in fact is running FROM both of those parts of his record…what’s left?

The apparent answer is saving the Olympics, which I’m really not sure people care that much about, and it’s twelve years old in any event. How many people even remember that the games twelve years ago were in trouble? I don’t know. I suspect this will do little for Romney, though. Keeping going an event meant to showcase international cooperation doesn’t mix well with the boisterous, hawkish nationalism that Romney has cultivated throughout the process. It has the side effect of clashing with one of his main themes.

Romney’s position hasn’t weakened dramatically in the polls–at least, not yet–as a result of the past few weeks of bad Bain coverage. But I’m not convinced that the Obama Campaign is interested in a mere ephemeral bump in the polls from this episode. Romney’s attempts to bring up his business career will be met tit-for-tat with any number of counterattacks down the stretch. Every minute spent fighting over whether Romney’s career was incredibly successful or inhumanly awful means less time spent on discussing the economy, and thus is probably lose-lose. If Team Obama can pull this off, history tells us that Romney SuperPACs like Restore Our Future will spend enormous sums carpetbombing the country with negative ads, hoping to disqualify Obama unilaterally. Which was probably the plan all along: phase one is Romney establishes himself as minimally competent and trustworthy, phase two is fathomless negativity courtesy of the PACs. I guess we’ll just have to see how it shakes out, though it’s worth noting this tactic’s failed him in two of his three prior campaigns.