Undermining Romney’s perceived competence as an economic policy-maker is, as Greg Sargent keeps explaining, critical to Obama’s November prospects. The Romney formula depends on economically anxious swing voters simply wanting to throw the incumbent out, a strategy that could well produce a victory in the current climate. Obama’s mission is to embed context about Romney’s own background and values into those same voters’ minds – to give them pause before simply checking off his name as a suitable vehicle for their frustrations.

The question, obviously, is whether voters will buy into the idea that Romney was a lousy governor – and, even if they do, if it will end up affecting their decisions. Two relatively recent campaigns offer some conflicting lessons.

Democrats would ideally like to do to Romney what Republicans did to the last Massachusetts governor to seek the presidency, Michael Dukakis in 1988. About the only attack that anyone remembers from that campaign was the racially inflammatory Willie Horton ad that an “independent” pro-George H.W. Bush group ran.

That spot highlighted a specific incident from Dukakis’ governorship, but what’s often forgotten is the degree to which the Bush campaign made Massachusetts the centerpiece of its efforts. A wave of attack ads in the summer and fall portrayed Dukakis’ gubernatorial tenure as a festival of tax hikes, rampant spending, criminal coddling, environmental pollution and general incompetence, each ending with the tag line: “Michael Dukakis says he wants to do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts. America can’t afford to take that risk.”

(A good compilation of many of the Bush attack ads can be found here.)

Bush himself paid two high-profile visits to the Bay State, one to tour Boston Harbor – then known as the dirtiest harbor in the country – and the other to receive the endorsement of the Boston Police Patrolman’s Association.

”My opponent will say that he will do for America what he’s done for Massachusetts,” Bush said during the harbor swing. “No, that’s why I fear for the country.”

It’s hard to quantify, but the relentless attacks clearly damaged Dukakis, who enjoyed a lead of 17 points just after the July Democratic convention only to find himself trailing by the same amount in the campaign’s closing weeks. The numbers tightened in the final days, but Dukakis still lost by eight points. Exit polls found that nearly half of Bush’s voters said they supported him mainly to stop Dukakis. “The distortion of my record contributed a great deal to my defeat,” Dukakis acknowledged the morning after the election.

Four years later, though, Democrats nominated another governor with a record the Bush team believed was ripe for exploitation: Bill Clinton, whose state of Arkansas ranked near the bottom in a host of important-seeming statistical categories.

Of course, Clinton had other baggage too, mainly involving “character” issues and widespread concerns about his honesty, and the Bush campaign spent plenty of time highlighting it. Bush also tried to play up tax increases that Clinton had signed as governor, but the attack was compromised by his own infamous “Read my lips!” flip-flop.

In the final weeks of the race, though, with polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead, Bush began criticizing Clinton’s gubernatorial record much more aggressively. In an October 19 debate, for instance, Bush replied to Clinton’s vow to solely responsible for his administration’s economic policy by saying:

“That’s what worries me — that he’s going to be responsible. He’s going to do — and he would do for the U.S. what he’s done to Arkansas. He would do for the U.S. what he’s done to Arkansas. We do not want to be the lowest of the low. We are not a nation in decline.”

Clinton soon interrupted with this:

“Jim, you permitted Mr. Bush to break the rules, he said, to defend the honor of the country. What about the honor of my state? We rank first in the country in job growth, we got the lowest spending, state and local, in the country, and the 2nd lowest tax burden. And the difference between Arkansas and the U.S. is that we’re going in the right direction and this country’s going in the wrong direction. And I have to defend the honor of my state.”

The Arkansas attacks never got Bush anywhere in ’92. That Clinton was prepared to counter dire-seeming statistics with happier ones of his own surely helped, as did his salesmanship skills. Perhaps a different candidate wouldn’t have defended himself as ably. On the other hand, it may also be that voters, unnerved by what seemed to be a rotten economy, simply decided to tune Bush out and to regard his attacks as desperate excuse-making and blame-deflection.  That’s exactly what Romney’s campaign is counting on happening this year.

That it’s come to this is, obviously, an indictment of the competence of McCotter’s political operation and, perhaps, the congressman’s judgment. (In trying to account for the snafu, he said that “someone… lied to me.”) But in a way, it’s also a cautionary tale about what can go wrong when your average backbench member of Congress becomes a minor cable news celebrity and mistakes it for having a genuine national following.

This is what led the 46-year-old McCotter to enter the Republican presidential race last July. First elected to the House in 2002, he gained a measure of prominence in the Obama-era through his House floor speeches and his appearances on the overnight Fox News show “Red Eye,” showcasing what Jim Newell called “his brand of ‘wry’ Republican and Tea Party humor, which is really just the same old nonsense with a twist of sarcastic condescension.” With Mitt Romney facing a skeptical party base, McCotter apparently spotted an opening and jumped in.

His campaign lasted for just two months, during which time he was roundly ignored by the media, donors and party leaders and finished dead last in the Iowa straw poll with a total of 35 votes – 0.2 percent. His most visible campaign activity consisted of pointedly tweeting about unrelated subjects during GOP debates he wasn’t invited to, and the most press attention he got came through sarcastic reporter tweets about the futility of his efforts. In September, he dropped out.

There may or may not be a direct relationship between that quixotic adventure and McCotter’s current nightmare. It’s possible his attempts to make it on the national stage caused him to take his eye off the ball on his House reelection, or maybe it’s just a coincidence. Either way, a presidential campaign that he thought would elevate his standing ended up having the opposite effect, and it looks more foolish than ever in light of this week’s news.

This is not the first time a story like this has played out. There’s the classic example of “B-1” Bob Dornan, the far-right Orange County congressman who tried to parlay C-Span prominence into a campaign for the 1996 GOP nomination. Unlike McCotter, he actually made it into the debates, but it didn’t matter. On the weekend before the New Hampshire primary, Dornan ended up literally begging a roomful of New Hampshire Republicans to check his name off so that he’d get at least one percent of the vote. They ignored him and he dropped out, then returned home to find his House seat in jeopardy. His vanity mission hadn’t gone over well with the locals, who ousted him in favor of Democrat Loretta Sanchez that fall. Dornan was last seen mounting a random 2004 primary challenge against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, falling short by 68 points.

McCotter may yet avoid Dornan’s fate, and when you consider that even Herman Cain managed to gain traction last year, you can at least begin to understand why he decided to give the White House race a shot. But if he had it to do over, here’s guessing McCotter would have spent less time worrying about the Ames straw poll and more time focusing on his own backyard.

This came at the end of a month in which Romney’s supposed “healthcare problem” dominated coverage of the race, with the candidate using a speech at the University of Michigan to plead with Republicans that they not consider his Massachusetts law as the blueprint for ObamaCare. Early polling wasn’t encouraging; already Romney had been (briefly) lapped by Donald Trump, and now Herman Cain was making a move. The only thing keeping Romney in contention, conventional wisdom held, was the lack of a truly credible alternative – someone ideologically acceptable to the base but with a resumé weighty enough to satisfy party leaders. Perry, the third-term governor of the nation’s second-largest state, seemed like he might fit the bill.

That Romney overcame this can, of course, be attributed to Perry’s utter incompetence as a communicator. When Perry finally entered the race in August, he immediately opened a large lead over Romney and – and unlike, say, Cain – had an opportunity to cement it by uniting the party’s opinion-shaping class behind him. But Perry’s trainwreck debate performances scared those Republicans away and hastened his demise.

But it’s also true that Romney was actually fairly well-positioned at this time last year. Healthcare was never that big of a problem for him, since it was simply the idea of ObamaCare – and not any of the particulars of the actual law – that enraged the GOP base. This allowed Romney to rail against ObamaCare while spouting gobbledygook to claim that he’d done something completely different in Massachusetts. If he’d defended the federal law for some reason, Romney would have been giving away the nomination, but he knew better than to do that.

The other advantage Romney enjoyed, as Seth Masket points out, has to do with the Tea Party-era evolution of the definition of conservatism. The policy positions that the right now demands were relegated to the fringes just a few years ago – meaning that there really never was going to be an alternative to Romney who was both ideologically pure and credible as a national candidate. Even Perry, as it turned out, had some ideological baggage. And besides Perry, Romney only had to fend off candidates that party leaders were never interested in lining up behind – Cain, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann.

This doesn’t mean the nomination was in the bag for Romney the whole time. Perry was a legitimate threat (and Tim Pawlenty perhaps could have been one, had he shown any life on the trail), and a major chunk of the GOP base – white evangelical Christians, especially in the South – remained resistant to Romney even as it became clear he’d be the nominee. But the predictions of his imminent demise that popped up throughout 2011 seem a bit foolish now.

Is there a lesson here for the next time around, even given the odd circumstances and candidate roster that defined the 2012 GOP race? Maybe it’s this: If a front-runner seems wounded and vulnerable, don’t write him or her off until there’s a truly credible alternative on the stage.

Not surprisingly, this has Republicans pointing to the state as a ripe November target for Mitt Romney. There’s plenty of logic to this. The recall effort has been the story in Wisconsin for a year now, and the partisan and ideological lines are clearly drawn. So, given this polarized, high-interest climate, if the numbers end up breaking the GOP’s way on June 5, how could it not be some kind of harbinger for the fall?

Actually, there’s a good reason to think it won’t be: The same polls that have Walker well-positioned to fend off Barrett don’t give Romney quite the same strength. The most recent public survey, released last week by St. Norbert College and Wisconsin Public Radio, put Walker ahead 50 to 45 percent in the recall race and Obama up 49 to 43 percent on the presidential side. Before that, a poll from Marquette Law School gave Walker a six-point lead while showing a dead heat in the Romney-Obama contest.

It’s a reminder of the very mixed partisan and ideological messages that swing voters frequently send. In theory, it’s hard to imagine a voter brushing off the Democratic portrayal of Walker as a far-right ideologue, tool of the rich and destroyer of middle-class jobs while simultaneously buying into the same caricature of Romney. But swing voters often aren’t making straight judgments on policy and ideology, which is why where they say they stand on major issues often doesn’t line up with how they say they’ll vote in an election. So it’s very possible that Wisconsin voters will give Walker the go-ahead to finish his term and then vote to give Obama a second one this fall.

There have been so few statewide recall campaigns in American history that it’s hard to draw meaningful lessons from the past, but the example of California is worth keeping in mind here. In October 2003, the state’s voters recalled Gray Davis and installed Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor. Added together, Schwarzenegger and the other major Republican candidate on the ballot, Tom McClintock, took 62 percent of the vote, prompting Republicans to argue that the state’s political terrain had shifted and that George W. Bush would have a shot of winning it in 2004.

“Anybody who says California is impossible or out of play is wrong,” Ken Mehlman, who was then one of Bush’s top political aides, said at the time.

But the California recall was a harbinger of nothing. In 2004, John Kerry beat Bush by 10 points in the state, a number that was just two points off Al Gore’s 2000 pace – and consistent with a national popular vote shift in Bush’s favor.

Determining how competitive Wisconsin should be this fall is a tricky matter. Viewed one way, the state is a Democratic bastion at the presidential level: Obama won it by 14 points in 2008 and the state has gone blue for six straight elections. Even Michael Dukakis carried it! But this paints a misleading picture. The ’08 result represented the most dramatic swing in the country from 2004, when Kerry won the state by just two-fifths of one point. It was even closer in 2000, when Gore took it by a fifth of a point. And Dukakis’s win in ’88 could be chalked up to a brutal upper-Midwest economy that resulted in just about the only non-coastal patch of blue on that year’s electoral map.

The polls that have Obama and Romney in a close race in the state are a dramatic illustration of the erosion of Obama’s standing with economically anxious middle-class white voters. The state now seems back to being one where Democrats have a small built-in advantage but where Republicans can compete.

But this would have been true with or without the recall. Which means that Obama’s chances in the state are the same right now as they will be the morning after next week’s recall vote – no matter the result.

But as James Hohmann of Politico points out, the sit-down could have much broader, longer-term significance: If Romney ends up winning this year, Rand Paul will immediately become his most obvious threat for a 2016 primary challenge.

With 77-year-old Ron Paul heading off into retirement at the end of this year, Rand Paul is set to become the national face of the libertarian message associated with his family’s name. The assumption is that he’ll ultimately run for president, but the question is when. Unlike his father, Rand seems willing to modulate his message and rhetoric in a way that could expand his appeal within the Republican Party and make him a genuine threat to actually win state primaries and caucuses, something Ron still has never done.

This could make Paul very dangerous to a President Romney, whose ideological purity conservative leaders still doubt. From a governing standpoint, this would give Romney little room for maneuvering, particularly if Republicans control both chambers of Congress. He would be under immense pressure from the right to support and implement their agenda, no matter how politically toxic it is. If Romney were to balk at doing so, or seek some major compromise with Democrats, or simply be seen as not pushing hard enough, he’d be inviting a conservative revolt – and Rand Paul would be a logical figure to lead it.

We’ve seen a dynamic somewhat like this before, back when George H.W. Bush was president. As I’ve written before, there are some striking parallels between how Romney and Bush 41 rose to power – and the suspicion with which their late-in-life embraces of conservatism were viewed by the GOP base. So when Bush cut a deal with Democrats in 1990 to reduce the deficit by raising taxes, conservative activists weren’t eager to give him the benefit of the doubt or to invent some rationalization to go along with him. They revolted, setting off an intraparty war that damaged Bush’s presidency and produced a 1992 primary challenge from Pat Buchanan. (Before Buchanan jumped in, there had been talk that Bush would instead be challenged by a then-former Texas congressman named Ron Paul.)

At least Bush had some wiggle room, though. When he was president, the GOP was evolving into the absolutist conservative party it now is, but there were still plenty of genuine Republican moderates and an awful lot of pragmatists on Capitol Hill. Romney wouldn’t have that luxury. The party and its congressional representatives are far more uniformly conservative today, and whatever instinct Republican members of Congress have for compromise is quickly being snuffed out by the threat of primary challenges.

The threat of a ’16 campaign by Rand Paul – or another prominent conservative – is one that would haunt a Romney presidency and is the best reason to doubt that Romney’s old flair for moderation will return if he’s in the White House.