President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign strategy is to define Gov. Mitt Romney as someone who will make the United States and the American people worse off than they are already.

It attempts to brand Gov. Romney as a homophobic, anti-women, out of touch country-club Republican who wants to take America back to the protect-the-rich policies that got the country into the mess that it’s in. So why isn’t the strategy working?

The “Republican war on women” campaign fizzled.

There are just too many successful, high-profile conservative Republican women to sell the idea that Republicans want to cut off access to contraceptives and keep women dumb, barefoot, and pregnant.

The “Buffet rule” everyone-should-pay-their-fair-share-in-taxes strategy isn’t working.

There may be a growing class of government-dependent people who don’t pay taxes and want to spread the wealth around; however, the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t resent the rich, they want to become one of them. A growing number of the Hollywood elite don’t like the idea of increasing taxes on the rich either.

The Washington Post treating questionable reports about Gov. Mitt Romney assaulting a fellow high-school student because Romney thought he was gay, as if it was the equivalent of the Watergate scandal, doesn’t wash.

Just about everyone did something stupid in high school, and there’s little evidence to support the Post’s biased slant on the story—that Romney knew the student was gay.

President Obama’s election campaign openly intimidating contributors to a superpack that supports the governor, by publishing their names and encouraging personal attacks on them, is beginning to backfire.

Americans understand that attacking private citizens because of who they support is what Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez do, not the President of the United States.

American presidential politics has never been a white-glove affair; it’s a bare-knuckle boxing match. Nevertheless, there are rules, the most important of which is that you don’t intentionally strike your opponent below the belt. That’s cowardly and un-American.

The growing belief that President Obama isn’t playing by the rules and his policies are taking the country in the wrong direction is evident in the polls. Daily presidential tracking polls are trending toward Gov. Romney. The Rasmussen Reports May 10-11 overnight tracking poll showed a Romney with a seven percent lead over President Obama (50 to 43 percent).

President Obama may believe that he and his campaign don’t have to play by the rules because the liberal-leaning mainstream media won’t call him on it and because not enough people listen to conservative talk radio or the Fox News channel. That would be a big mistake.

It’s true that the mainstream media is complicit in the President’s strategy. It’s not only that most journalists are Democrats, they believe that it’s so important for the first black-American president to succeed that they are loathe to report on anything that reflects negatively on the President’s character and that might damage his reelection chances.

It’s no different than the media generally ignoring black-on-black crime while making a national sensation out of the Trevon Martin shooting by “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman. Liberals have a paternalistic attitude toward African-Americans. They tend to suppress facts that show blacks, especially a black president, in a negative light. They believe it only feeds the racists in our society; and African-Americans have had too long a record of slavery, mistreatment and abuse that it’s necessary to tip the scales in their favor.

Attacking Gov. Romney, however, is a different matter. Anything that puts him in a negative light is fair game. The news media sees no compelling reason not to; rich white people, after all, have all the advantages. Moreover, helping defeat Romney allows the news media to ensure the President’s success; and, in the news media’s mind, that’s just doing the right thing.

What can or should Gov. Romney’s campaign and Republicans do to counter the President’s negative campaign strategy? The last thing they should do is adopt a similar strategy. Republicans shouldn’t allow themselves to be taunted into the mud pit.

Conservative talk-show hosts and others likely will attempt to dig up dirt on President Obama as Sean Hannity attempted to do during the 2008 election and is doing now. But this tactic is unlikely to have any more success than it did in 2008. Americans now are more concerned about what Barack Obama has done as president than they are about what he did before he entered politics.

Tough criticism of President Obama’s dismal record and his failing policies are fair game, while emphasizing Gov. Romney’s positive vision for restoring America. But when your opponent is digging a deep hole for himself, don’t take away his shovel. If President Obama continues on the low road he’s currently on, he almost certainly will lose the 2012 election.