Romney Takes the Gloves Off

Mitt Romney unleashed the first straight-up negative ad in Iowa and New Hampshire attacking the phenom, Mike Huckabee.

Mitt has the money to run several tracks of ads, both positive and negative, so this may be a smart political move. His goal, of course, is to shine more light on what he perceives as Huckabee’s problems. It is a smart ad in that it starts off with where they both agree — how they are both pro-family and pro-life — and then goes on to hit Huckabee on immigration.

The beginning is also a very clever, indirect slam at Giuliani. Hard to describe Rudy as pro-family or pro-life! Unless you are talking pro-many families and pro-his own life. So Mitt’s astute political team gets a double whammy: one direct hit and one hard-hitting but veiled jab.

Rudy is unlikely to respond and get mired in that debate, and Huckabee has a limited budget to deal with Romney in the paid media. The other wise move on Romney’s part was to start airing the ads now, before the week of Christmas when negative ads could see a serious backfire.

Romney’s ad boys, Alex Castellanos and Russ Schriefer, again show themselves as pretty smart cookies!