But outside of that ’94 primary, every time Romney has been in a competitive race, an opponent has accused him of making his fortune by gutting companies and ruining the lives of innocent workers.

The new Obama ad, which is airing in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado, focuses on the story of GST Steel, a company in which Bain purchased a majority stake in 1993, just before Romney’s first foray into politics. In 2001, after Romney had left his day-to-day role with Bain and was overseeing the Olympics in Utah, GST’s Kansas City plant was shuttered, costing more than 700 workers their jobs even as Bain itself profited. The ad mixes in clips of Romney boasting about his job creation record and empathy for the jobless with testimonials from those whose lives were affected by the plant’s closure.

“It was like a vampire,” one former GST employee says of Bain. “It came in and sucked the life out of us.”

It’s a dramatic, well-produced ad that paints a damning portrait of the presumptive GOP nominee and the firm he built. The question is whether it will be effective, and the track record for previous Bain assaults on Romney is mixed:

1994 Senate general election: Here is the example the Obama team is hoping to emulate. After his September ’94 GOP primary win, a poll gave Romney a narrow edge over Ted Kennedy, whose own popularity had waned in the wake of the William Kennedy Smith trial. By the end of the month, the Kennedy campaign settled on Bain as Romney’s prime vulnerability, and made the firm’s acquisition of an Indiana company, SCM, a major point of emphasis. Here is one of several SCM ads that Kennedy’s campaign ran:

Interestingly, when this assault began, the Boston Globe noted that Romney had been running warm and fuzzy ads about his personal story for a few months and suggested that “voters may see this series as the powerful Kennedy machine beating up on that nice young man.” But by early October, Kennedy was comfortably ahead again, and the race wasn’t close the rest of the way, with the incumbent prevailing by 17 points. Were the Bain spots responsible for the giant polling shift? It’s impossible to say for sure, but they clearly didn’t hurt.

2002 gubernatorial general election: Romney spent much of the fall campaign running behind the Democratic nominee, state Treasurer Shannon O’Brien. He seemed to gain traction, though, with an attack ad that played up the losses that the state’s pension fund incurred on O’Brien’s watch from investments in Enron.

O’Brien countered by reviving the SCM story, running ads on the incident and calling Romney “the face of corporate greed in America.” She also launched an spot called “Sizzle” that featured a laid-off worker from GST – the same steel company Obama is now highlighting – who told viewers:

“It’s hard to believe that a man like Mitt Romney can have enough power and influence and money behind him to come in, destroy families, put people out of work that’s sick, with no health insurance. There’s nothing left. We have nothing left.”

O’Brien, though, lost to Romney by 7 points. This doesn’t mean the Bain attacks backfired. As Boston journalist Dan Kennedy noted today, Romney struggled throughout the ’02 general election more than the prior two GOP candidates – Paul Cellucci and Bill Weld – had. And it may have been a last-minute push by Romney to link O’Brien to unpopular Democratic leaders in the state Legislature that moved voters. Still, the fact remains that O’Brien played the Bain card aggressively, and it didn’t bring her to victory.

2008 Republican primaries: Bain was not a huge issue in this race, but when Mike Huckabee said that Romney reminds people of “the guy who laid you off,” he was clearly trying to harness the instinctively negative feelings that even many blue-collar Republicans have toward the world of venture capital. That line may have helped Huckabee in Iowa, where he beat Romney by 9 points.

Then, in the run-up to Florida’s primary, John McCain directly attacked Romney over Bain, arguing that “as head of his investment company he presided over the acquisition of companies that laid off thousands of workers.” McCain ended up winning Florida narrowly, a result that cemented him as the clear front-runner and dealt a severe blow to Romney’s hopes.

2012 Republican primaries: The attacks on Bain were far more pointed in Romney’s second bid for the GOP nomination, with Rick Perry accusing him of practicing “vulture capitalism” and Newt Gingrich branding him a “predatory corporate raider.” The Gingrich campaign even created a vicious 29-minute video titled “King of Bain,” which was released about a week before the South Carolina primary:

Democrats, of course, were delighted by this development, and an income gap came to define the GOP race, with Romney generally cleaning up with affluent Republicans voters but often losing to Gingrich (and later Rick Santorum) with those in the working and middle classes. At the same time, Gingrich took immense heat from leading Republican voices, who blasted him for doing dirty work for Democrats and defended Romney’s Bain work. And Santorum refused to join the Bain pile-on, saying that “I just don’t think as a conservative and someone who believes in business that we should be out there playing the games that the Democrats play, saying somehow capitalism is bad.”

What the Paul crowd can do, though, is make noise – loud, uncontrollable noise that disrupts the proceedings and gives the media something to play up. Exhibit A: The headline from the Arizona Republic’s story about Saturday’s convention: “Arizona Ron Paul supporters boo Romney’s son off stage.”

There’s some dispute over the accuracy of that headline, which was mimicked by leading national publications. According to the Republic’s report, Josh Romney, who was representing his father’s campaign at the convention, “had to stop repeatedly as people booed and yelled for Paul.” But some Paul supporters say Romney was only jeered when he encouraged attendees to support his father’s slate and that he wasn’t forced to leave the stage. The video that’s available doesn’t clear things up.

Not that it really matters: Whether it was over and over again or just once, the bottom line is that Paul’s crowd loudly booed the son of their party’s presumptive nominee. And it’s hardly the first time something like this has happened at a state convention. When they seized control of Alaska’s convention last month, for instance, pro-Paul attendees heckled two United States senators, Lisa Murkowski and John Barrasso, who were there to speak. That too made national news.

Similar behavior by Paul backers in Tampa could spoil what for the Romney campaign is supposed to be a nationally televised infomercial. The problem for Romney and convention organizers is that, short of giving up and letting Ron Paul have the nomination, there’s not much they can do to pacify the Paul-ites.

Under the extreme worst-case scenario for Republicans, Paul supporters end up with a giant share of the delegate slots (a quarter of them, say) and launch a four-day heckle-fest, bitterly resist any effort to quiet them or evict them from the hall – a modern version of the chaos that reigned inside Chicago Stadium Chicago’s International Ampitheatre at the Democrats’ 1968 convention. In a more optimistic scenario, there’s only limited booing from a handful of delegates, and it rates on the nuisance scale somewhere near the annoying air horns that were a little too audible during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 acceptance speech in Detroit.

The good news for Republicans is that Paul himself will have an incentive to help them, since he’s interested in his son Rand’s long-term political viability and probably won’t want the family name forever associated with a destructive national convention. So if his supporters get too exuberant in Tampa, Paul might simply express to them how important he believes it is that they treat speakers with respect – sort of like when a rowdy crowd at a sporting event starts to disrupt the game and the home team’s coach steps in to quiet them down. Here’s former Cincinnati Bengals coach Sam Wyche with a lesson in how it’s done:

Those last three words are the key. The bill to strip public employees of their right to bargain collectively was introduced a few weeks after Walker’s chat with Hendricks, prompting protests of an unprecedented scale in Madison and giving rise to the recall effort. Walker has long argued that he was responding to a budgetary emergency, and that unduly generous contracts won by public sector unions were a big reason for it. His desire, the line goes, was merely to correct a flawed system that encouraged elected officials to commit huge sums of taxpayer money to public employees, for fear of incurring their wrath in elections.

What Walker swears he wasn’t – and isn’t – interested in doing is taking power away from private sector unions. There’s a very practical reason for this. In Wisconsin, an unusually large segment of the electorate – 26 percent, in the most recent statewide election — is composed of voters from union households. (Nationally, the figure is 17 percent.) And the union tradition is ingrained in the state’s history. So Walker, in his public comments, routinely distinguishes between the two types of unions. “Private sector unions,” he said recently, “have been our partner in the economic revival we’ve had in this state. A bigger issue is the impact the public-sector unions have had on the taxpayers.”

Union leaders and their Democratic allies have been pleading with voters to see this as a ruse, a way for Walker to divide the union movement by pitting public employees against private sector workers. Which makes the new video so powerful. Here is the governor conversing with a billionaire (who later gave $500,000 to his campaign) and telling her all about his “divide and conquer” strategy against union power. Granted, it’s not clear if Walker is actually laying out a road map to make Wisconsin a right-to-work state (a complete transcript of the exchange isn’t much help), but the video basically conveys everything that Democrats have been trying to get voters to see about him. And its run-time is 28 seconds – ready-made for a television ad.

That he felt compelled to do this speaks to the lack of confidence his campaign continues to feel about Romney’s support among a major chunk of the GOP base: white evangelical Christians, who continued to vote against him in primaries even as his nomination became inevitable.

There are two main theories about why this resistance exists. The first has to do with Romney’s religion, and the widely held conviction among evangelicals that Mormonism is, as one conservative Christian leader memorably put it, a “theological cult.” The other involves the premium that evangelical voters tend to place on cultural issues, and Romney’s suspect credentials on them (from back in his Massachusetts days, when he was avowedly pro-choice and pitched himself as a stronger advocate for gay rights than Ted Kennedy).

Whatever the exact explanation, Romney and his team clearly do not feel that they can take the support and – maybe more important – the enthusiasm of evangelicals for granted the way most previous Republican nominees could. This could severely complicate Romney’s efforts to separate himself from what to general election swing voters are some of the most unappealing aspects of the modern Republican Party. Any position he takes or utterance he makes that puts him at odds with the Christian right threatens to prompt a loud uproar from evangelical leaders. How much slack (if any) they’re willing to cut Romney in the name of general election expediency is unclear at this point.

This is why the timing of Romney’s Liberty speech is even more awkward now than when it was initially announced. No one knew back then that the week leading up to it would feature an endorsement of gay marriage from President Obama. In the run-up to Obama’s announcement, talk focused on the political risks that would be involved for him. But in the aftermath, it’s becoming clear that Romney and other top Republicans see just as much risk for themselves.

Public opinion is moving fast on gay marriage, and already a clear majority of independent voters support it, which explains why Romney has shown little interest this week in playing up his opposition and tried to change the subject when asked about it.  (House Speaker John Boehner has been doing the same thing.)  And even when Romney did discuss the issue on Thursday, he made sure to note his support for gay adoption, something he never would have mentioned during the primaries, given that evangelical leaders do not share this view.

At Liberty, Romney will be in something of a bind. A more confident nominee might see the venue as ideal for a Sister Souljah moment, defiantly distancing himself from the ardent culture war politics that Liberty embodies. But this would entail serious risks – an intraparty civil war? – that Romney has consistently shown he’s not comfortable taking. The opposite strategy – pandering to a crowd that has spent the past week hearing about a supposed assault on traditional marriage – is just as problematic, since it would reinforce Romney’s problems with swing voters.

That leaves Option C, which is for Romney to mostly ignore the elephant in the room and instead speak broadly about values and his own family life, while weaving in a few shots at Obama over the economy. Based on the excerpts that have already been released, this is what Romney plans to do. At best, this will allow him to get through Saturday without offending skeptical evangelicals or alarming swing voters. At worst, it will reinforce two real general election liabilities for Romney: his party’s alliance with evangelical conservatives, and the degree to which he lives in fear of offending them.

The next potential spoiler? Arkansas, whose primary is May 22. With that in mind, I dial the toll-free number listed on John Wolfe’s official presidential campaign website and the phone is answered by the receptionist at his Chattanooga law office. You haven’t heard of him, but Wolfe’s will be the only non-Obama name on the ballot. He  fits the basic profile of a fringe presidential candidate – zero name recognition, no obvious base of support, a total lack of money, organization and media attention, multiple quixotic bids for local and federal office – but in the wake of the West Virginia verdict, I’m guessing he’s feeling good about his chances. I leave a message and a few minutes later the candidate returns the call. He hasn’t heard the news yet.

“I was watching Fox last night,” he says. “They didn’t have anything about that.”

Not that he’s surprised by what happened.

“That’s one of the undercovered stories,” Wolfe asserts. “If you look at Obama’s primary results and you compare those with the last Democrat incumbent, Clinton in ’96, when he was running in his primaries – he was racking up between 95 and 100 percent everywhere.  And Obama – in New Hampshire, he just got 83 percent. And in Oklahoma he got, like, 57 percent. There’s a lot of discontent in the party with him.”

This isn’t quite true. Clinton, for instance, officially netted 84 percent in New Hampshire’s 1996 Democratic primary, almost exactly what Obama got this past January. But when it comes to states like Oklahoma and West Virginia, there obviously is unusual antipathy toward the president among Democrats. I ask Wolfe if race could be playing a role.

“If it is a factor, it shouldn’t be,” he replies. “People should just look at the economics of it. I don’t know how much of a factor race really plays. This is, after all, a Democratic primary.”

When it comes to talking about his platform, Wolfe mostly defies the fringe-candidate stereotype. He’s an aggrieved progressive, frustrated by a White House he sees as far too cozy with big money interests. He thinks healthcare reform was a giant giveaway to the insurance industry, and that Obama should just call for universal Medicare. He ticks off the names of all of the top administration officials who have ties to Wall Street, and scoffs at the toothlessness of Dodd-Frank. He remembers that Obama was willing to put Social Security “on the chopping block” in his zeal to cut a deficit reduction deal with Republicans last year.

“He sides adamantly with the business class,” says Wolfe.

When he tries to make a point about Afghanistan, though, Wolfe gets distracted  and plays to type.

“Why are you supporting a dictator over there, Hamid Karzai, who has a hat – you know, this is kind of an odd thing to say, but the mainstream media won’t mention it: His hat – his qaraqul – is made with aborted lamb fetuses.”

The presidential race is a big step up in class for Wolfe, who has previously been defeated in three U.S. House elections, one House primary, a Chattanooga mayoral race and a 2007 Democratic primary for the Tennessee state Senate. The results have never been close, either, and the ’07 race ended with state election officials levying a $10,000 fine against him for failing to file a campaign finance report. Five years later, he still hasn’t paid it, and so he’s currently banned from seeking municipal or state office in Tennessee. Wolfe says he still plans to pay up, and stresses that the fine is the result of sloppy paperwork, not fraud.

He didn’t just drop everything to run for president, and tries to balance his day job (“I do general practice, I do some civil rights claims, labor claims, injury claims, divorces, you name it”) with campaigning. He wanted to run in the New Hampshire primary “because everyone is there,” but otherwise chose to compete only in nearby states, to limit his time away from the office. Does running for president hurt his bottom line?

“Yeah, it does,” Wolfe admits, “because I can’t take on as many clients. And I’ve had to take some cases where I’ve had to divide the case – just take on other counsel, just basically pay other people to do some of the case while I do what I do.”

In New Hampshire, where the ballot was littered with long shots just like Wolfe, he grabbed 245 votes, good for 15th place if you account for write-ins. He fared better in Missouri, then seemed to strike gold in Louisiana’s March primary, clearing 15 percent in three congressional districts – enough to qualify for delegates. But party leaders quickly found a way to rule him ineligible, pointing to his failure to submit a diversity plan for his convention delegation.

“The funny thing about that was I had a couple of people who were going to sign on. An African-American chiropractor from Lafayette and another guy who had been with the Young Democrats, an African-American, and then they were pressured by their peers not to sign up with John Wolfe. You know, they said, ‘Well, if you go against the president as a delegate, you’ll never live it down and that will be the end of your political career in Louisiana.’ So that was interesting.”

In Arkansas, he’ll have another chance. The state was Obama’s worst in the 2008 primaries, with Hillary Clinton crushing him by 44 points. That was partly due to Clinton’s deep ties to the state, but it also reflected the same general discomfort with Obama that was – and still is – evident in that neck of the woods.

“I think Arkansas will be a situation where there will be discontent there too,” Wolfe says.

If he does end up bringing a contingent to Charlotte this summer, Wolfe says he’ll try to convince other delegates to vote for an open convention, which would free those who are now pledged to the president from their first-ballot commitments. There’s no chance he’ll pull that off, but when a federal prisoner manages to give the sitting president a scare in a primary, you can forgive a fringe candidate for dreaming.