When Republicans have trouble with something in their candidate’s past or present, they fix it by Karl Roving it. This means that they take their candidate’s weakness and make it his strength by using it to smear the other candidate. So, faced with Mitt Romney’s Mormonism and an evangelical base that just yesterday thought Mormons were a heretical cult, they are doing what they do best. They’re taking Mitt Romney’s family history with polygamy (a now renounced tradition of his faith that he does not practice) and painting Barack Obama with the same polygamy brush.

This is supposed to accomplish two things: one, put their base on attack against Obama thereby changing the focus of the conversation and two, use up the media cycle of the story on their opponent until it becomes boring, at which point when the accusation is made about their candidate, no one will care. It’s old school Rove.

Upset about a Democratic governor mentioning Mitt Romney’s family history with polygamy, Republicans have decided the best defense is a good offense.

The Daily Beast started it all with this:

While discussing swing states, (Montana Gov. Brian) Schweitzer said Romney would have a “tall order to position Hispanics to vote for him,” and I replied that was mildly ironic since Mitt’s father was born in Mexico, giving the clan a nominal claim to being Hispanic. Schweitzer replied that it is “kinda ironic given that his family came from a polygamy commune in Mexico, but then he’d have to talk about his family coming from a polygamy commune in Mexico, given the gender discrepancy.” Women, he said, are “not great fans of polygamy, 86 percent were not great fans of polygamy. I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.”

Never mind that he said he was not suggesting that Romney is pro polygamy, the same evangelicals who used Romney’s faith as an attack during the primaries are now super angry that anyone would dare to mention it as a reason Romney might be in trouble with women voters. My sense from the polls is Romney has enough troubles with women voters on his own, but fair enough.

This has lead to accusations that Obama’s family has a history of polygamy. Fox News, News Busters, et al are on the bus. The attack is to call Democrats a “cult” (hahaha, that’s funny, right?) because nothing hurts like a good projection.