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Poor Willard Romney. He realizes he’s fighting a losing battle against President Obama, most Americans, and even many in his own party.

So what’s a whiner to do? Well, according to First Read, hope aloud that the winning side will stop saying mean things about you. Never mind all the lies and secrecy of your own, forget all the out of context clips of your opponent that totally mislead voters. Water under the bridge!

See, the only thing that counts is avoiding more black eyes and punches to the gut, see. And what better way to do that than to get down on your knees pray scream  beg for mercy politely and publicly make it be known that you’re waving the Etch A Sketched white flag. For now.

Romney also said in the interview he would like a pledge (of sorts) with Obama that there be no “personal” attack ads. “[O]ur campaign would be– helped immensely if we had an agreement between both campaigns that we were only going to talk about issues and that attacks based upon– business or family or taxes or things of that nature.” (Question: Is Romney really saying that scrutinizing his business record — which he has held up as one of his chief qualifications to be president — is personal? But we digress…) He continued: “[W]e only talk about issues. And we can talk about the differences between our positions and our opponent’s position.” Romney said of his own campaign: “[O]ur ads haven’t gone after the president personally. … [W]e haven’t dredged up the old stuff that people talked about last time around. We haven’t gone after the personal things.” That doesn’t mean surrogates or Super PACs have, as was brought up to him. Bottom line, obviously, this negative stuff is getting to Romney or he wouldn’t have said this. Campaigns that are winning never complain about the tone of the campaign …

Awww, poor dear. His manicure got all scuffed up and it clouded his memory.

TPM picks it up from there:

Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul offered up a broader take on whether Romney was really suggesting that his career at Bain Capital — the crux of his argument that he is better equipped to handle the economy — should be considered off-limits.

“The governor was expressing his view that he hopes we can have a campaign focused on the issues rather than one of desperation and lies as we’ve seen from the Obama campaign,” Saul said in an e-mail.

Pot. Kettle. Desperately lying. This is just one more example of typical GOP, hypocritical, Rovian projection. However, this time around, it isn’t working.