Wag the Rom

At the Corner, Victor Davis Hanson writes about the dog wars, the slut wars, the polygamy wars, etc., and notes that what’s interesting is that “Romney’s team — and his defenders and supporters — did not feel it was too big to respond to these trivialities, and instead hit back hard and quick:”

In other words, just as Bill “war room” Clinton decided that he was not going to rerun a Dukakis-like 1988 punching-bag campaign, so too Romney apparently has decided that McCain was too above the fray in 2008. Of course, things are different, and McCain had innate problems with dealing with the unknown and landmark candidacy of Obama, but, like it or not, 2012 is going to be a tit-for-tat slugfest.

Good for Romney for fighting back — and for front-loading the media bias references (which was something that a few on the right suggested after the McCain campaign’s debacle in late September of 2008), but the key element in VDH’s post is the reference to the latter half of the equation in the phrase, “Romney’s team — and his defenders and supporters.” Jim Treacher found the cold, dispassionate reference in Obama’s autobiography to his eating dogs, and when the polygamy smear was brought up by a Democrat governor, numerous commenters at Hot Air were on it immediately, followed by Jim Hoft’s post here.

The early reference by Romney to “a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy,” should make NRO alumnus Byron York feel good, considering he wrote a book with that very title back in 2005. But I wonder how much pushback will be occurring spontaneously on Twitter from Romney’s supporters* and how much will come from the Romney campaign itself. As Stacy McCain writes, the Romney campaign had better push back against the endless “drip drip drip” that’s already coming from the MSM and other Democrats, acting, as they did in 2008, as the self described “non-official campaign staff” to Obama.

* Read: conservatives and Tea Party members who aren’t necessarily fans of Romney per se, but whose motto has been Anybody But Obama. Romney is now that man, and hence, it’s sink or swim time for both the GOP, and the nation’s immediate future.