The attenuated attacks are so unusual that I think it proves that the media has determined who the conservative candidate is because they’re going after me with hammer and tong and that’s the way you would expect to go after the conservative candidate. And I’m proud of the fact that the mainstream media isn’t wild about my candidacy and that’s why I’m going to win. ~Mitt Romney

Attenuated?  The attacks themselves are weakened and diminishing?  Certainly the attacks will attenuate Romney’s political appeal, but the attacks are not attenuated.  If anything, they are too strong and dense for Romney to handle!

Strange diction aside, this is blind optimism in the face of (political) death.  I suppose you have to spin it positively and make it seem as if articles that describe you as a “loser” are really being written because the left secretly fears that you are a big winner, but nobody except for the true loyalists are buying this stuff.

It is possible that you can make a hostile media into your adversary and try to rally populist resentment against the media to boost your candidacy by non-traditional means, but that is hardly something that any candidate enjoys or wants to have to do.  The media across the spectrum actively hated Pat Buchanan, and that did not exactly win him the nomination.  If media loathing were an indication of the certainty of future conservative success, Barry Goldwater would have been President for eight years.  Of course, Romney is neither Buchanan nor Goldwater nor anything like them.  As Dean, Obama and McCain have shown, if the media love you they can generate a lot of “buzz” and make you into a viable candidate when you would normally have no business even being in the race. 

What I think is so amusing about this latest bout of Romneyite whining about the media is that Romney would not even be a remotely serious candidate right now but for the tremendous attention the media have been giving him.  He has no more business running for President than Obama, yet he has been promoted and taken seriously by many observers (including the great election watcher Chuck Todd, who believes, in opposition to everything Democrats actually say about Romney, that the Dems are most afraid of a Romney nomination) who should know that he is not that great of a candidate.  Without the mainstream media, which really has to include the major conservative opinion journals that have been boosting his candidacy to one degree or another over the past year, Romney’s candidacy would be nowhere.  Very few people know who he is, but even fewer would know about him if he had not been getting the third-degree over his flip-flopping and the publicity from the endless stream of “Mormon question” articles.  The Weisberg and Linker articles, while deeply wrong or mistaken in different ways, probably generated more attention for Romney in the press than some of his own campaign activities!  Because he has apparently been deemed by many insiders to be the anointed establishment alternative to McCain, in spite of Romney’s record and opportunism, the media have treated him with far more serious scrutiny than he really deserved, and now he is discomfited by the attention and wants to use the scrutiny as proof that he is the real conservative that all of the media coverage has proven him not to be. 

This scrutiny has less to do with the media’s concern to “get” the conservative candidate as such, and has much more to do with the inevitable intense scrutiny that any major candidate will face.  Romney has failed the test of this scrutiny time and again and is now using the last trick he has, which is to lump the media into his enemies’ list as a last-ditch way of rallying people around him.  Now if he could just get Le Monde to run a hit piece on him, he would really be in good shape!   

Update: If Romney were confident that he was the obvious conservative candidate in the race, he wouldn’t be bringing in Michigander students and activists to CPAC to make sure that he wins the meaningless straw poll there.  He desperately craves legitimation from a prominent conservative body, because he knows how badly he needs it.  The other candidates, except for Giuliani (obviously), don’t need to rig meaningless votes to win credibility–they already are conservative!