Presumably, you've seen the video from the Iowa Republican debate the other night. The details and the video itself can be seen in this diary. I'm not clever enough to be able to embed the video here, but Jed Lewison's diary has the information (from Steve Benen's article).
Fox News’ Bret Baier opened the question up to all eight of the candidates on the stage.
For those who can’t watch clips online, Baier phrased it this way: “I’m going to ask a question to everyone here on the stage. Say you had a deal, a real spending cuts deal, 10-to-1, as Byron said, spending cuts to tax increases…. Who on this stage would walk away from that deal? Can you raise your hand if you feel so strongly about not raising taxes, you’d walk away on the 10-to-1 deal?”
All eight candidates raised their hand. Literally all of them, if offered a debt-reduction deal that’s 10-to-1 in their favor, would simply refuse.
I apologize for reposting a chunk of Jed's diary, but I needed to do that to get to my point--which is in the title of this diary. Polling shows Romney as the only Republican of the declared or even semi-serious candidates (no, Giuliani doesn't count) doing reasonably well head-to-head against Obama.
My ad (and I really wish I had the chops to make it myself, I'm sure many of you could do it in five minutes, certainly Jed could) simply runs the clip, audio and video, seen in the Benen article and Jed's diary (it's 27 seconds long, so maybe cut a few seconds of it while the candidates are slowly all raising their hands; you'd need about 22 seconds to show the important stuff if you did that). Then, a frozen shot of all of them, with their hands up, then a close up of Romney, then another shot panning back to all of them with their hands up.
After the audio from the debate is finished and their hands are all up, like I said, about 20 or so seconds in, the voice over begins--simple, but devastating: "Mitt Romney ( (during the close-up of Romney with his hand up, then voice pauses while the camera pans back to all of them with their hands up together).... "Just as nuts as the rest of them."
The ad would show Romney in lock step with people as extreme as Bachmann and Paul and the extremists in the Tea Party who gave us the Tea Party downgrade of our credit rating by S&P. The ad speaks to people's gut, but is actually substantive and issue-based, it's not a Swift Boat-like attack on someone biography or personality. There would be no way out for Romney. He'd be finished.
UPDATE: Thanks to the Yes We Can Pragmatists and Progressive Messaging for the republish!