Politico reports that the Obama campaign plan is to make the general election a referendum on Mitt Romney’s “weirdness.” There is some political mileage to be made out of Romney’s phoniness, I agree, but they must be out of ideas if this is their big plan. What I found more puzzling was the Obama team’s belief that Romney will take on additional baggage of unpopular conservative positions during the nominating contest:

Obama officials, however, believe they’ll have more grist for their flip-flop line of attack after the primary because Romney will eventually have to veer right to convince the GOP base he can be trusted with the nomination.

“He’s going to take some unpopular, right-wing stands,” an adviser said. “That was one of the main things that hung McCain up — how he had to go through the nominating process.”

I have to assume that they were not paying attention. In 2007-08, McCain was not “hung up” by adopting “unpopular, right-wing stands.” McCain’s problem in the nominating process was that his support for immigration amnesty had harmed his presidential bid, and he spent the rest of the campaign claiming that he had learned from the backlash against the bill. In truth, McCain mostly talked about immigration as little as possible after that, and tried to placate voters by emphasizing enforcement. If this remained a problem for McCain during the general election, it was a problem of weaker turnout among conservatives who had no interest in voting for him because they didn’t trust him on this and many other issues. McCain’s main difficulties in the 2008 campaign were his strong attachment to the Iraq war, which had been extremely unpopular ever since 2006, and the utterly clueless and haphazard way in which he responded to the financial crisis in September. The financial crisis itself also guaranteed that the candidate representing the incumbent party was sure to lose.

Romney has so far distinguished himself in the last six months with fewer instances of sudden changes in position. Most of Romney’s metamorphosis from moderate Northeastern Republican to standard-issue movement conservative happened several years ago. There will always be those, including myself, who regard Romney as profoundly untrustworthy and unusually unprincipled, but during this cycle Romney has continued to play the role he first assumed in 2007. Romney remains an exceptional opportunist, but he has spent enough time in his new role that this isn’t as much of a problem for him as it used to be. The Massachusetts health care legislation that is supposed to wreck Romney’s chances at the nomination is the one thing from his past that he has so far refused to disavow. Romney has probably done all the veering right that he is going to do, and he may not need to do much more to win the nomination. As long as there are several popular candidates running to his right during the nomination contest, Romney just needs to retain the conservative vote he had last time and rally the moderate vote that was split between him, McCain, and Giuliani last time. The threat from Huntsman has so far failed to materialize, which gives Romney the luxury of being able to avoid a lot of new pandering that would remind voters that he will say anything to win support.

Romney is a phony, but the Obama campaign is overestimating how useful that will be. If they are drawing on the lessons of 2004, they are failing to remember that Bush barely eked out re-election when the economy was still in relatively good shape. Kerry the “flip-flopper” narrowly lost that election, but does anyone think that Kerry would have lost if unemployment had been over 8%? Of course not. Campaigning against Romney by making him into the new Kerry will be seen as a sign of desperation, which is what it is.