Romney's message to Obama voters: He let you down

Good piece, with some interesting, if anecdotal, information from Byron York:

The important thing for Romney, aides believe, is not to rub the voters' noses in their decision from four years ago. Don't bash Obama, don't even harp on how he's not up to the job -- that carries the implication that they should have known that when they voted for him. [LB: I can bash him and harp on how he's not up to the job and how that was obvious four years ago. But Romney can't.] Just focus on the point that his policies have not made things better. "You've got to be careful in terms of how you talk about the president," says a top Romney campaign aide. "It's his policies and performance voters are concerned about -- that's the focus."

Yup. And that's clearly been the focus, as all of the content of the RNC speeches showed.

As I wrote in my RNC wrap-up,

[T]he "more in sorrow than in anger" tone of Ryan's speech...continued with Romney's. And again, that's the hand they've been dealt. Americans are understandably touchy on the subject of race, and, the protestations of the media and the Democrats to the contrary, they do not want to be "unfair" to "the black guy." It felt good to go into the voting booth and pull the lever for a black man, to personally repudiate the ancient history of slavery and the more recent history of Jim Crow. Americans do not want to be racists, do not want to think of themselves as racists, and will bend over backwards to give the first black President the benefit of the doubt. ... What the Republicans are doing, out of necessity, is trying to give the undecided middle permission to vote against him, without feeling bad about it. Hence the tone, which is just the right tone.