Obama vs. Romney is starting to look like Mac vs. PC, a case of reverse branding

Anybody else notice how political advertising has usually the opposite objective of consumer product advertising?  What I mean is political ads are usually focused on trying to rebrand the candidate's competitor as something negative vs. trying to sell the benefits of their own candidates.  For example, Romney has branded himself as a job creator, but the Obama team is focused on branding Romney as untrustworthy.  

Like any good marketer their anti-Romney campaign keeps pushing 'untrustworthy' as the primary theme or essentially trying to develop a reverse brand equity, and the marketing campaign supports this benefit statement with several different platforms of reasons to believe that help reinforce the equity, such as:

1) Suggest Romney will say anything to get elected and switches viewpoints when its convenient

2) Suggest Romney was responsible for outsourcing US jobs while at Bain

3) Suggest Romney lied about when he left Bain and may have committed securities fraud by doing so

4) Suggest Romney is hiding his money in tax havens because he is refusing to show his historic tax returns

This effort has forced Romney to spend a good portion of his time denying these charges, which just makes him look defensive and less trustworthy, especially because he has stubbornly refused to show his tax returns - the only proof of his innocence.  While its unfair, Romney started his campaign with a deficit of trust, not only because he's running against an incumbent, but also because the reality working against him is that many American's have a mistrust of the Mormon religion because different scares many people even in this day and age.

While I will not openly support or condemn these attacks on trust, the execution of the campaign is brilliant from a marketing strategy standpoint and follows the perfect formula for reverse branding and ingraining the equity/benefit in consumer/voters minds. A clear benefit that strongly resonates, supported by a clear reason to believe, and then when that reason to believe's shelf life expires and it's impact/breakthrough starts diminishing, rotating to new reasons to believe that all ladder back up.

Outside of politics, marketers rarely get a chance to reverse brand a competitor.  Though the best consumer product execution of this strategy was by Apple in their infamous series of Mac vs. PC ads:

Is it just me or is Obama vs. Romney starting to look like Mac vs. PC?  Reverse branding works when supported by enough reasons to believe.