So, assuming Mitt Romney is the G.O.P. nominee, here's the commercial I'm thinking the Democratic Party will run. We see a white couple in their late thirties sitting in a modest living room, perhaps surrounded by children. The camera pushes in on them and they say…
HUSBAND: We have three children, a dog and a large mortgage. We don't travel. We don't spend money lavishly. We can only afford to eat out about twice a month.
WIFE: He works a sixty hour week and I have a part-time job. Between us, we made $61,000 last year and we still sometimes have to live off credit cards we can never quite pay down to zero.
HUSBAND: Last year, Mitt Romney paid a much lower tax rate than we do. He not only has no problem with that, he wants even lower taxes for people in his bracket.
WIFE: He says it's to help the "job creators." But Mitt Romney doesn't create jobs. He got very rich closing down U.S. businesses or moving them overseas.
HUSBAND: And I oughta know. I worked for one of them. After he killed my job, it took me a year to find the one I have now.
WIFE: If he runs the country the way he ran businesses, he'll do fine…but people like us won't.
And maybe they'll sneak something in there about how a Republican Congress wants to raise taxes for the lower and middle classes and unsecure Social Security and matters of medical cost and a President Romney would encourage and allow them to do that. (By the way, here's a chart that compares Romney's effective tax rate with yours.)
So, uh, why wouldn't Democrats go with a campaign like this? Any reason other than that Barack Obama usually gets an awful lot of donations from folks who have the same vision of how taxes should work as the Republicans?