Romney’s Caught in a Real Bind

Greg Sargent of The Washington Post lays out the most daunting challenge facing Republican candidate Mitt Romney as he stumbles into the final phase of his campaign against President Barack Obama:

Mitt Romney might still win this election, but he’s now stuck in a trap that will be difficult to escape. Americans are rejecting his argument that they should view their choice mostly as a referendum on Obama’s economic performance, because they blame the sluggish recovery on the magnitude of the mess Obama inherited from George W. Bush, and believe things will get better in Obama’s second term. That is putting pressure on Romney to be more specific about why his alternative, such as it is, would spark a faster recovery than is occurring under Obama.

But Romney can’t be too much more specific about that alternative, because it risks reminding voters of the degree to which his policies resemble those of the aforementioned George W. Bush, under whom the meltdown happened in the first place.

Sargent goes on to examine the results of a new survey that “finds Romney’s framing of the race may not be resonating.”

READ MORE: “The Two Major Views About Why Romney Is Losing, and Why the Second Is More Convincing,” by Robert Reich; “Conservatives to Mitt: We Never Liked You Anyway,” by Paul Waldman (The American Prospect); “Romney’s Nightmare Scenario,” by Ezra Klein (The Washington Post); “The New Grover Cleveland?” by Ed Kilgore (Washington Monthly).