Via Politico:

Deval Patrick isn’t much of an attack dog.

And that can’t be making the Obama campaign too happy.

Thursday is the day when the president’s camp is hitting rival Mitt Romney with a full-on assault on his record as Massachusetts governor, complete with a State House press conference starring top Obama political advisor David Axelrod.

So who better to get the party started than Patrick, the current Massachusetts governor, immediate successor to Romney, and someone who is very close to Obama and some of his top campaign aides.

But he could have been a character witness for the defense.

Hitting the Thursday morning TV news shows, Patrick barely managed a few yips at Romney — and was more at home cuddling up to Bain Capital and the Republican nominee.

Patrick’s performance shows the always-dicey role that surrogates play in a campaign. If they’re on message, they can be a potent way to add another credible voice to pound home the campaign’s message. If they’re off-key, as Patrick was Thursday, it gives the opponent a way to point out that even the candidate’s own friends don’t buy into the attack and seriously blunts its effectiveness.