In a blistering editorial marking the start of summer campaigning, the Wall Street Journal said the Republican presidential nominee was "squandering an historic opportunity" to beat Barack Obama.
Mitt Romney's bid for the White House suffered setbacks on several fronts yesterday (Thursday), as his wife conceded that his opponent was moving in for the kill and America's leading Right-wing newspaper criticised his campaign as "politically dumb".
In a blistering editorial marking the start of summer campaigning, the Wall Street Journal said the Republican presidential nominee was "squandering an historic opportunity" to beat Barack Obama.
Its editorial board, one of the most influential voices on the American Right, said Romney must stop making unforced errors and start outlining how he would lift the US out of economic woe.
"Romney promised Republicans he was the best man to make the case against President Obama, whom they desperately want to defeat," they concluded. "So far Romney is letting them down."
The article came amid disquiet about the Romney campaign from prominent conservatives, as well as pressure from Obama about his finances, and the release of some encouraging economic data.
On a bus tour of the crucial rust-belt state of Ohio, the president boasted yesterday that by bailing out the US car industry he had been "betting on the American worker" and "betting on American industry".
Meanwhile "Mitt Romney is betting his resources in the Cayman Islands, in Bermuda, in Switzerland and God only knows where else he is putting his resources", said Ted Strickland, a former Ohio governor, who introduced Obama in the city of Maumee.
Investigations by Vanity Fair and the Associated Press this week refocused attention on a $3?million (pounds 1.9?million) Swiss bank account Romney secretly held until 2011, and dozens of offshore holdings by Bain Capital, the private equity firm he headed. He denies avoiding tax.
In an interview at their $8?million (pounds 5.2?million) summer retreat in New Hampshire, Romney's wife, Ann, complained Obama's campaign was attempting to "kill" her husband. "They're going to do everything they can to destroy Mitt," she said.
Three labour market indicators - private sector hiring, new lay-offs, and new benefit claimants - were better than forecast yesterday, prompting hopes among Obama's team that today's official unemployment figures for June could show improvements.
Despite the stuttering economic recovery, Obama leads Romney nationally by 2.6 percentage points, according to an aggregate of polls by RealClearPolitics, and holds narrow leads in the battleground states of Florida, Ohio and Virginia.
Anxious conservatives are voicing concerns. Rupert Murdoch, the Wall Street Journal's owner, criticised Romney via Twitter for not looking like a "challenger" and for "playing everything safe".
His newspaper's attack centred on Romney's fumbled response to the Supreme Court's upholding of Obama's controversial health insurance "mandate", which the court effectively redefined as a tax.
While other Republicans condemned the new "middle class tax", Romney at first demurred because he pioneered an identical system as Massachusetts governor, yet denies raising taxes.
But just 48 hours after his spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, said he did not believe "Obamacare" was a tax, Romney changed course and told an interviewer that it was.
The muddled message reignited fears that Romney was the wrong candidate to capitalise on the unpopularity of Obama's health reform, which fuelled the rise of the Tea Party in the 2010 mid-term elections, when the Democrats suffered humbling losses.
The Wall Street Journal said Romney was turning "the only possible silver lining" in the ruling - "that the mandate to buy insurance or pay a penalty is really a tax - into a second political defeat".
William Kristol, another leading conservative commentator, yesterday described Romney's belief that he could win by pointing to Obama's economic failings as "dangerous self-delusion".
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