WASHINGTON – For months David Axelrod, President Barack Obama's longtime senior strategist, has argued with evident anticipation that Mitt Romney offers a glass jaw when he boasts that his business record sets him apart as a presidential candidate.

Now Romney's Republican rivals have beaten the Obama team to the punch, and Democrats could hardly be more pleased.

"It's a total win-win," said Geoff Garin, a Democratic pollster who works with a group supporting Obama. "Either Romney will be the nominee or one of those other, even more unelectable candidates will be."

The Republican sniping this week – with rivals lumping Romney, a former private equity executive, with corporate raiders and even "vultures" – highlights the tension within a party that has historically backed business and eschewed class-based political attacks. The economy has delivered scant gains for many middle-class and blue-collar workers over the past decade, and the Republican base now includes large numbers of these workers.

Even before the tea party movement arose three years ago after the big bank bailouts, the Republican base had grown more populist, heightening old tensions between Main Street and Wall Street Republicans. The Romney rivals plainly are playing to the ascendant, anti-Wall Street grass roots.

Romney counters that the attackers are assailing capitalism itself. Appearing on Fox News on Wednesday, he said his victory in New Hampshire's Republican primary proved "this kind of attack on free enterprise is not gaining traction for them."

But his competitors persisted as the nomination fight moved to South Carolina for its Jan. 21 primary. The danger for Romney is that Republicans have given their imprimatur to criticisms that undercut his chief argument for his election – his business experience – and by extension another, that he is the most electable against Obama.

While a few Democrats fret that the Republicans' clash could inoculate Romney against the very attacks they planned if he becomes the nominee, most are enjoying the show.

Since Sunday his rivals have pummeled Romney as a cutthroat capitalist who profited with his private-equity partners at Bain Capital from snatching, stripping and selling companies, costing rather than creating jobs.

Democratic operatives say Republicans' words are certain to be heard again in advertisements this fall if, as many expect, Romney is the nominee.

"We'll be able to show what his rivals said about him and what workers have said about him," said Brad Woodhouse, communications director for the Democratic National Committee. "The fact that his own Republican rivals – from a party that talks about itself as being for the free market – are offended about his practices in the private sector makes our case a lot easier."

Romney's own words stoked the rivals' fires, giving Democrats more grist. Republicans mocked him for telling New Hampshire voters that he, too, has feared "pink slips," calling the claim implausible for the Harvard-educated son of a multimillionaire governor.

And they pounced on his statement, captured on videotape, that "I like being able to fire people," although they took it out of context since he was complaining about those who do not provide good service, specifically insurance companies.

The sudden intraparty assault has helped Romney in one way, prompting even conservative skeptics like Rush Limbaugh to come to his defense. The conservative Club for Growth singled out Newt Gingrich for "economically ignorant class warfare rhetoric" that is "downright Obamaesque."

A "super PAC" supporting Gingrich plans ads depicting Romney as a corporate raider "more ruthless than Wall Street."

Only former Sen. Rick Santorum has not joined the criticism.

"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," he said on Fox on Tuesday.

The controversy is encouraging to Democrats as they weigh Obama's re-election prospects in a year when the weak economy is the main issue.

It can only help, their thinking goes, if the most likely Republican nominee emerges from the race as a representative of – in Axelrod's words – "everything that people hate about this economy."

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.