I’m in complete agreement with Ross Kaminsky that the Bain-bashing from Newt Gingrich and the others has reached the point where it sounds as if Elizabeth Warren is seeking the Republican nomination. But we’re kidding ourselves if we think Barack Obama isn’t going to try the same tactics Ted Kennedy used to beat Mitt Romney in 1994, only more ruthlessly.

Put simply, Romney needs to be much more effective in answering these attacks than he was back then. If anything, this is a political climate even more hostile to layoffs and corporate fatcats than the year Romney lost his Senate race. Gingrich and company have probably passed the point where they are merely road-testing an issue that will be problematic in the general and are now reinforcing the eventual Democratic narrative. But Romney needs to come up with a rebuttal to this critique and there is no time like the present.