Obama: Mitt Romney is a… Radical Libertarian?

Team Obama cannot be serious:

President Barack Obama is previewing his next strategy in the 2012 campaign — an audacious effort to paint former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and the majority GOP as radical libertarians that have abandoned mainstream American politics.

Since 2000, “we [Democrats] haven’t moved that much… What’s changed is the Republican Party,” Obama told a group of wealthy donors gathered Monday night at a New York mansion owned by Marc Lasry. Lasry is a billionaire equity-capitalist who runs a $20 billion fund that buys up the shaky assets of failing companies.

Republicans “have gone from a preference for market-based solutions to an absolutism… [to] a belief that all regulations are bad; that government has no role to play,” said Obama [...]

The president’s divisive strategy is designed to persuade swing-voters that the former governor of Massachusetts is a radical libertarian, even though Obama has repeatedly said his health-sector law is modeled on Romney’s Massachusetts law.

Obama has also suggested recently that GOP legislators and supporters are irrational, unhinged and sick.

President Obama surely must be delusional to cast his presumptive opponent as a radical libertarian. It’s Mitt Romney we’re talking about here. The guy who was a moderate governor of a blue state, who once said he doesn’t want to go back to Reagan-Bush and not to mention the guy who imposed a decidedly not libertarian mandate in his state which the President says he emulated to beat back Republican attacks on his own health care law.

When it comes to the Republican Party as a whole, maybe Obama is correct that the party has become more libertarian since the Bush era. But I would argue Bush-era “compassionate conservatism” was the movement from the norm. This libertarian change is the GOP getting back to its roots.

But then, the same party nominated Mitt Romney to be President, so how “radical” could it be? If this is Obama’s next line of attack he needs to get the kinks ironed out or get laughed. Probably both.