Mitt, steer toward deficit if you want to win election

With all the polls reporting continued slippage in Mitt Romney’s campaign, especially in the battleground states like Ohio, the only real strategy, it seems clear, is to hammer Barack Obama on his failure to keep a promise to cut the national debt in half in his first four years.

Unless he can center his campaign on that theme, the Republican’s odds of beating the incumbent Democrat are getting longer by the day. Even a sterling performance in the upcoming debates probably isn’t enough to overcome the president’s leads in Ohio, Virginia and other battleground states. Romney is trailing by 10 points in Ohio, and no Republican has won the presidency without carrying the state.

In Ohio, the power of the incumbency has been particularly noticeable with the White House dumping a truckload of federal funds into projects designed to improve the job situation. Ohio received the first grant in a program to create 15 manufacturing centers, and Ohio companies received $125 million in clean-air tax credits, to mention just a couple of examples of federal election-year generosity.

So how does Romney succeed in convincing voters they’d be better off with him? May we suggest taking a deep breath and promoting the deficit issue, to the exclusion of much else, making every stump speech a referendum on the administration’s major failing?

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