On her Monday program, conservative radio host Laura Ingraham ripped into Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign for its lackluster performance, citing unfavorable polling data showing Romney trailing President Barack Obama, despite the bad economy and high unemployment numbers.

Given that the economy is bad, Ingraham argued Romney should be shoo-in and blamed the Republican Party’s leadership for that not being the case.

“If you can’t beat Barack Obama with this record, then shut down the party,” Ingraham said. “Shut it down, start new, with new people because this is a give-me election, or at least it should be. And the millions of dollars — I keep going back to the million and millions and millions of dollars that are paid to these political consultants election after election. We hire people who have lost previous campaigns, that run campaigns that have failed, who have message campaigns where the message fell flat — and they keep getting rehired. I don’t understand that. I don’t know why those are the people you hire.”

Ingraham singled out branding as one of the Romney campaign’s primary flaws.

“If I’m hiring messaging people — I’m finding out for instance who did the original GEICO gecko commercial?” she said. “Because that guy or gal who did actually knows how to brand something. So I’m going for the best branders and the people who have been successful against the Alinsky crowd in the past. That’s it. And if you’re Mitt Romney with all of your expertise and all of your knowledge about how the economy works and you’re in this — you have one shot. This is going to be the first line of your obituary. You won, or you lost. It’s all on the line for the country and it’s all on the line for you. You know saying that, ‘Well the numbers are disappointing’ — yeah the numbers are disappointing.”

And with last week’s job numbers, finding something that resonates to counter Obama’s “hope” theme shouldn’t be difficult, Ingraham said.

“The numbers that came out on Friday show not only is there no recovery, but the real unemployment rate is around 12 percent,” she said. “People have abandoned all hope of getting a job. We have 400,000 people almost who quit looking for work. That’s hope?”

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