Last week, some leading voices on the right — including the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board and Washington Post columnist George Will — called on presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney to be bolder and more aggressive with his campaign, from top-to-bottom.
But on Monday’s “America’s Newsroom,” Fox News’s Brit Hume suggested that there might be a reason behind the Romney campaign’s passivity: they want to wear the Obama campaign out and unload on them with one crushing attack.
“They are using what you might call the ‘Braveheart’ strategy,” Hume said. “You remember the famous battle scene, and Mel Gibson saying, ‘Hold, hold, hold.’ Well, they are holding. You might call it the rope-a-dope strategy, like Muhammad Ali and the famous prize fight with George Foreman, where he laid back and let Foreman punch and punch and punch, and then when he got tired he’d knock him out, or knock him down. I don’t remember whether or not it was a knockout or not or a TKO, or whatever. But, he won the fight.”
Hume said it was probably too soon to determine if this is the right or wrong plan of attack for the Romney campaign.
“That is the strategy they seem to be employing at this stage, not that they are not answering some of these ads, they are,” he continued. “But you do have to be concerned if you’re a Republican strategist that this effort to mark Romney as a corporate raider and so on may be telling in some way. I don’t know the answer. If I did, you know, I’d be one of these wizards running campaigns and making tens of millions of dollars.”