Maybe Mitt Romney really will be able to ride anti-Barack-Obama sentiment all the way to the White House. His general election specialty has quickly become converting the president’s arrows into boomerangs. Attacks on Ann and Seamus have quickly backfired on those who made them. Romney today deflected Obama’s not-so-subtle “silver spoon” comment, as well.

In an interview with “Fox and Friends,” Romney refused to apologize for his father’s success and appeared wholly unperturbed by the president’s petty, desperate remarks.

“I’m certainly not going to apologize for my dad and his success in life,” Romney said on “Fox & Friends.” “He was born poor. He worked his way to become very successful despite the fact that he didn’t have a college degree, and one of the things he wanted to do was provide for me and for my brother and sisters.”

The former Massachusetts governor, added: “The president likes to attack fellow Americans. He’s always looking for a scapegoat, particularly those [who] have been successful like my dad, and I’m not going to rise to that,” Romney said. “This is a time to solve problems. This is not a time for us to be attacking people. We should be attacking problems.”

Might as well get comfortable, folks. We have a long road of this ahead, attacks and counterattacks — and all primarily about people, not problems. After all, the president can’t run on his economic record. The national debt is approaching $16 trillion, unemployment is still above 8 percent and, if the president is going to take credit for “creating” 3 million jobs, he’ll also have to take responsibility for the millions who’ve exited the job market completely. Incomes have gone down under his presidency and we’ve had a record number of foreclosures. As Romney says in the video, “We’re not better off than we were when Barack Obama came into office; we’re worse off.”

It’s clear, though, that Romney is not willing to be the president’s scapegoat — and he’s also not going to alienate those who like the president by stooping to the level of cheap attacks. It’s very early, but Romney’s already doing well — and the president appears more desperate by the day. It’s as though he knows that the American people care more about jobs than they care about whether Romney was born with a silver spoon in his mouth.