This'll be brief, but I thought it was interesting enough to share.
As I reflect on Romney's attempt at a gotcha moment on the Benghazi attack, it strikes me that this is his entire career in a nutshell: when you think you see a window of opportunity for a cheap-shot crippling attack, you take that risk because the potential payoff is tremendous. That is Bain Capital's business model in a nutshell.
But at Bain, he had plenty of time to make sure there was money to be wrung out of the corporate prey, and if things didn't work out he could simply dump the deal, sell off the company and take a tax loss. The difference here, of course, is that this was a one-shot moment where if he got it wrong, he would take a personal hit...one he couldn't mitigate through accounting tricks later.
That is a situation he has faced so rarely in his life that he didn't recognize it when it presented itself. He is accustomed to identifying a moment of vulnerability and moving in for the kill, but he has always done so from a position of safety.
His impulse was to jump for the jugular, so he did...and found himself floundering in a net.
Watch it again...and check out the focus group tracking line at the bottom of the video. Obama well above the line, Romney dives into negative territory. Oops.
Romney's orientation to the world reminds me a rich big-game hunter on one of those disgusting "hunts" where they don't actually do any hunting: he hires underlings to identify prey, chase it, tree it, disable it, and then the Mittster gets called in to take the shot, collecting the trophy and feeling like a big macho dude.
But here, he's not sitting safely in his Jeep waiting for a call. He's on equal footing, and if he guesses wrong, he gets whacked in the face. As he did last night.