So Mitt Romney went ahead and decided to hit Barack Obama in the one area everyone knows is his weakest point, the one area where the public might still turn him out of office. You know, the economy jobs the deficit bailouts foreign policy (really?):

“The president characterized as bumps in the road — the developments of the Middle East, we just had an ambassador assassinated. Egypt has elected a Muslim Brotherhood or person as president. Iran is on the cusp of having nuclear capability,” Romney said in an interview with NBC News. “We have tumult in Syria and also Pakistan, and I don’t consider these bumps in the road. I think this is a time for American leadership domestically; the president’s policies are a continuation of the past four years. We can’t afford four more years like the last four years.”

Which is well-timed for this survey to come out:

Americans trust the federal government to handle international affairs more than at almost any point in nearly a decade, according to a Gallup poll released Tuesday. The poll, conducted from Sept. 6-9 as part of Gallup’s annual Governance survey, showed that 66 percent of the 1,017 polled have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the federal government’s ability to handle international problems, higher than at any point since mid-2003. Only 33 percent claimed that their faith in Washington’s ability to handle foreign affairs was “not very much” or “none.”

Thirty-three percent–that’s really just the hard partisans there. Obama’s approval rating on foreign policy is decidedly lower than 66%, but the poll nonetheless shows no public dissatisfaction at all with the direction of foreign policy, at least none that is exploitable by Romney since he presumably has all the people who have a problem with it locked up. And yet he continues to waste his precious time trying to bust down a door that might as well be made of neutronium.

I suppose I should discuss why it makes sense he wouldn’t abandon this critique. Campaign strategy is set and executed based on assumptions. You start with polls and focus groups to give you an approximation of what Joe Sixpack is thinking, and since that’s not perfect you use intuition and political acuity to try to fill in the gaps. For Romney to change his strategy on foreign policy would involve changing his assumptions (since he’s clearly not going based on what the data tell), which is something that he and his staff are probably not all that willing to do. They’re invested in these assumptions, professionally and personally. One of those assumptions is that the public is deeply offended by the way Barack Obama comports himself on the international stage, a “flaw” they press relentlessly. Part of this theme’s premise is no doubt the influence of Dan Senor, who in addition to being one of the most notorious screw-ups of the Bush years is apparently one of Romney’s closest aides, even advising him on non-FP subjects like his vice presidential choice. Something tells me this guy isn’t going to shrug and pivot to a platform of pure realism, or even studied vagueness. He’s the very definition of a stand-patter when it comes to hawkery.

And the results have been disastrous. Assuming that Senor is the one pushing Romney to take these stands so frequently and aggressively, he’s managed to put Romney at a far weaker position relative to Obama on foreign affairs than his domestic people have, where it’s more or less even (which is still pretty bad under the circumstances, mind you). His campaign in the latter case has been heavily evasive and abstract, likely by design. But the results have been nothing like foreign affairs, where muddling along has apparently never been an option. It’s impossible to know how many votes Romney has lost with this shtick, but it’s not impossible to gauge how much time has been lost because Romney feels the need to continually go on the attack on an issue stacked heavily against him, rather than on one where Obama is shaky. Refocusing his campaign on economic issues at this point would seem to be imperative, but it appears that Romney could not care less about those issues. Instead, the “No Apologies!” act gets another engagement, rolling forward mostly due to bureaucratic inertia like the Bay of Pigs invasion. This is merely the latest bad decision dictated by a bad strategy developed by tone-deaf political dummies, and in the highly likely event Romney loses in six weeks, one will have to wonder whether the apparent strategy of seizing on any statement that could possibly be construed as a foreign policy misstep absent context and howling about it was really a smart decision in a country where only 1/3 of the public has a problem with the status quo.

Thank goodness he’s a far worse politician than any of us could have imagined.