Thomas Dewey, governor...

...of New York, ran for president three times -- in 1940, '44, and '48 -- and lost three times. Part of Dewey's problem was that, as Alice Roosevelt Longworth famously put it, he looked like "the little man on the wedding cake."

I was reminded of this by a story in Politico yesterday:

Barack Obama’s aides and advisers are preparing to center the president’s reelection campaign on a ferocious personal assault on Mitt Romney’s character and business background, a strategy grounded in the early-stage expectation that the former Massachusetts governor is the likely GOP nominee.
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The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”
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The second aspect of the campaign to define Romney is his record as CEO of Bain Capital, a venture capital firm that was responsible for both creating and eliminating jobs. Obama officials intend to frame Romney as the very picture of greed in the great recession — a sort of political Gordon Gekko.

Understandably, the piece generated a fair amount of Sturm und Drang from Democrats as well as Republicans.

My advice to the Obama team? Just keep repeating what Mike Huckabee said: "Romney looks like the guy who laid you off."