Elections  are less likely to be decided by  debates  than by a handful of images engraved in voters' minds.  The possibility  persists that President Obama might win this battle of images -- and thus the  election -- by relentlessly depicting Mitt Romney as rich, out of touch, and  uncaring, a caricature amplified by endless repetition of Romney's "47 percent"  tape by the Obama campaign, with ample help from his devoted  media.

On  September 25, for example, long after it was news, all three networks reported  on how the damaging  video  simply won't go away (no doubt because they won't stop showing it).  They  magnified its effect in various ways: showing Obama mocking Romney's comment in  a speech, showing Romney being interrogated about it, and reporting that Obama  ads about the video are being run in swing states as an excuse to show it yet  again.  The media's brazenness reached a new level when, a mere hour after  the October 3 debate, Nightline showed the video repeatedly, no doubt  having expected Obama to have mentioned it.  The next day, the NBC, ABC,  NBC, and PBS evening news featured the Romney tape in reporting the "news" that  Obama surprisingly had not brought it up.  (Romney's recent declaration  that his comment was "completely wrong" is unlikely to make a difference in  coverage by a media that is determined to defeat  him.)

Yet  the attacks can be overcome, and the media filter can be bypassed.  Just as  Romney's use of ruthlessly negative ads knocked Gingrich and Santorum out of the  primaries, defeating Obama requires countering the 47 percent video with far  more devastating tapes in which Obama has been revealed as radical,  untrustworthy, and two-faced.

At  the top of the list is the chilling video of Obama whispering secret  assurances  of future flexibility to former Russian President Medvedev.  This alone  could decide the election, confirming what would be dismissed as hyperbolic  "conspiracy theory" if it were not caught on tape for all to see: that Obama  seemingly remains under the influence of his radical, anti-American  indoctrination and has a dangerous agenda he keeps hidden.  It reveals much  that the Romney campaign dare not say out loud.  Luckily, no one needs to  say it out loud.  They simply need to run campaign ads of this video until  this deeply unsettling moment becomes ingrained in the minds of every  battleground state voter.

President  Obama: "This is my last election. After my election, I have more flexibility [on  missile defense]."

President  Medvedev: "I understand. I will transmit this information to Vladimir."

Last  March, the Republican National Committee released an adshowing the open-microphone  moment, but its impact risks being diminished by the increasing flood of new  commercials.  And voters are less likely to retain numerous facts, figures,  and policy details than to remember a visual moment (everyone remembers Clint  Eastwood's chair, but who can recall much of Romney's convention speech?).   As Romney's strongest card, the Obama-Medvedev video deserves to be the  highlight of the campaign's final days, the main image voters take with them  into the voting booths.

The  Romney campaign also might note that Obama's overheard promise to Medvedev is  not an uncharacteristic anomaly, but rather the continuation of a pattern.   In 2008, the Obama campaign got caught promising Canadian  officials  the opposite of what he was pledging to primary voters -- a revealing instance  of duplicity Hillary Clinton tried in vain to warn Americans about.  There  are similar reported assurances to  Palestinians  to "sit tight" until after this election (not the first time such  a secret promise on Mideast policy has been alleged).

Similarly,  Ambassador Joseph Wilson notedin 2008 that one reason for Obama  foreign policy adviser Samantha Power's resignation was her "honestly revealing  on a British television program that Obama's public position on withdrawal from  Iraq is not really his true position, nor does it reflect what he would  do."  And Ahmadinejad now sounds disturbingly certain that a re-elected  Obama would be more  compliant.   Did Iran's president receive a Medvedev-type promise? Sadly, it's no longer  unthinkable.

The  second-most damaging tape is a newly relevant "oldie": Obama, at a private  fundraiser in 2008, disparaging ordinary Americans as bitterly clinging to  religion and guns -- a moment recently echoed by the Democratic Convention's  display of hostility to religion.  PBS and ABC, to their credit, brought up  the remark when initially reporting on the Romney 47 percent tape.  Yet  both drew the same odd conclusion: that Obama's statement is no longer damaging  because it passed some sort of expiration date.  As Judy Woodruff reported:

The  episode drew comparisons to  2008,  when then candidate Obama remarked at a private fundraiser that people in  depressed areas of the Midwest -- quote -- "get bitter and cling to guns or  religion." That statement came in the middle of the Democratic primary season,  giving Mr. Obama time to recover politically.

For  Romney, the timing is more problematic, with Election Day now just seven weeks  away.

A  modest proposal: saturate the airwaves with this Obama quote once again, damage  his candidacy with it once again, and he'll need "time to recover politically"  once again.

This  Obama quote deserves to be revived because it reveals secret contempt for a  demographic that includes a large portion of swing voters, and it has been  tested and found effective.  Jay Carney, as a pundit in 2008, saidit revealed "a huge weakness," and  that the outcome of the Pennsylvania primary would be a barometer of the effect  -- or non-effect -- of Obama's remark.  Sen. Clinton -- like Romney, a  personally unpopular candidate taking on the uniquely charismatic Obama -- won  in Pennsylvania by 10 points.

So  Romney really should take a hint and bombard the battleground states with the  "cling to religion" quote, combining it with videoof the majority of Democratic  delegates voting a resounding "no" to including mention of God in the party's  platform and booing when they did not prevail.  That moment, when Obama's  disdainful 2008 comment was revealed to be the 2012 Democratic Convention's  majority view, illustrated how completely the millions of Democrats and  independents who believe in God have been abandoned by today's Democratic  Party.  The media will not highlight this historic, game-changing  reality.  The Romney campaign must.

The  Medvedev and "cling to religion" videos both reveal the same inconvenient truth,  exposing Obama as a con man whose attitudes, beliefs, and policies behind closed  doors are frighteningly different from what he pretends in public.  His  opinion of the most cherished values of ordinary Americans seems to border on  contempt, while in foreign policy he treats antagonists as allies and vice-versa  (demonstrated again when an open microphone caught him disparagingBenjamin  Netanyahu).

Another  troubling moment caught on tape (and ignored by the media) is Obama's  characterization of Eisenhower-era America as closely resembling  Nazism  during a 2001 radio interview -- a comment that takes on new significance in  light of an e-mail to Democratic donors warning  that Romney would return us to "a social agenda from the 1950s."  Voters  are entitled to hear their president using the word  "Nazism"in  reference to his country and decide whether they agree and whether it affects  their vote.  (If Romney had said it, he'd be interrogated about it in  interviews and in the debates, pollsters would ask voters if it negatively  affected their view of him, and the media would report the poll results as yet  more bad news for his campaign.)

Among  the other compelling tapes ignored by the media, the  suppressed  video of Obama and three terrorists at an Israel-bashing event carries with it  explosive yet unused ammunition in the hands of the Romney team.  While ads  are running today in swing states demanding that Romney "should come clean" on his tax  returns,  the Romney campaign fails to reciprocally demand that Obama and his loyal media  release the video that clearly contains something so damaging that it could sink  his campaign.  (Meanwhile, the political ally of Ayers, Dohrn, and Khalidi  feels free to portray Romney as an extremist.)

There's  also a stunning tape of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, interviewed for Edward Klein's  book The Amateur, claiming  that the  2008 Obama campaign offered him a bribe to stay quiet.  Yet that bombshell  from Wright, who feels betrayed by Obama and is clearly eager to damage him, has  been disregarded by Romney and his surrogates and allowed to fade into obscurity  by the conservative media outlets that reported it.  Is everyone  asleep?

In  light of his record of domestic and foreign policy failure, Obama is running  surprisingly strong and cannot be counted out.  Defeating him might require  more than his dismal record alone -- something guaranteed to elicit a deep  visceral reaction.  It appears that Obama's reign, like Nixon's, can most  effectively be brought to an end by his own troubling words caught on  t