Romney actually strengthened by long primary battles

The Hill:

...

 When the Obama campaign released a pair of commercials earlier this month depicting Bain as a “vampire” that raided corporations with little regard for job losses, it largely mirrored similar efforts by Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry during the South Carolina primary this January. 

But the Romney campaign was quickly able to turn the critique to their advantage, using — as they had before — off-message surrogates and questions about commitment to free-market principles to undermine the core of rival attacks. 

Romney’s rebuttal was centered primarily around not conceding an inch on economic issues, and he used the renewed focus on jobs to cast Obama as naive on the way the free market functions. 

“There's no question but that he's attacking capitalism, in part I think because he doesn't understand how the free economy works. He's never had a job in the free economy, neither has Vice President Biden,” Romney told Fox News Thursday. 

Those comments closely mirrored Romney's response to Newt Gingrich's criticism of his tenure at Bain in January, where one of his campaign ads accused the former House speaker of putting “free markets on trial.” 

“A lot of people want to talk about how we create jobs,” Romney said, campaigning in January. “By the way — it is not to walk away from free enterprise. It is not to say that there is something wrong with the free market system. No, it is to hold fast to that system and to make it work for the American people.” 

Romney's recent rebuttal carried even greater weight because the Republican challenger was able to point to high-profile Democrats who were balking at the president's line of attack....The presumptive Republican nominee is reaping the benefits of surviving his primary struggle, and the lessons he learned throughout. While there were concerns that Romney's inability to shake his initial challengers might have weakened his campaign, instead he seems to have emerged with the begrudging respect of Republican loyalists....

It is curious that Obama's campaign did not notice that the attack did not work.  Perhaps their conceit about Republican voters led them to believe that other voters might think the attacks appropriate.

Since the Obama team has been on the defensive about the ads, they have only dug themselves deeper in the whole by saying it is really an attack on Romney's experience that does not qualify him to be President.  this is from a guy who was saying four years ago that being a community organizer was a qualification and now he is arguing that being a CEO of a multi million dollar corporation with diverse assets and business is less qualifying.  That does not pass the giggle test.