Romney's team is defiantly upbeat but realisticAfter one of their worst weeks of the general election campaign
As mandated by Journolist...
Mitt Romney and his advisers are scrambling to refocus their message and make up ground lost to President Obama in several battleground states.
I guess I missed the stories and polls that showed how he lost ground.
The mood around Romney's Boston campaign headquarters with just over six weeks until Election Day is defiantly upbeat in the face of a series of setbacks. "Given everything we've gone through, everybody wants to count this guy out," said Neil Newhouse, Romney campaign's pollster. "And yet the poll numbers don't do that. The poll numbers put him right in the middle of this."
Romney brushed aside questions about the state of his campaign in an interview scheduled to air Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes." Asked by anchor Scott Pelley how he planned to turn around his campaign, Romney responded: "Well, it doesn't need a turnaround. We've got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president [of] the United States."
"Defiantly upbeat", eh? But also correct, if one believes the published polls.
But the sensibility in Boston is also decidedly realistic. Some Romney advisers acknowledge that the burden is on the candidate and those around him to quiet
The message should be easy, and he had the discipline to get where he is.
Advisers to both candidates see the Oct. 3 debate in Denver as the best opportunity for Romney to force a shift in the campaign's dynamic, which has been running against the GOP nominee for the past three weeks.
Thanks to the drumbeat of the media drones.
Romney advisers now interpret the state of the race from two somewhat contradictory perspectives. On the one hand, they see national tracking polls that a week ago showed Obama in the lead immediately after his convention but that tightened dramatically after that.
But have not been published or acknowledged anywhere.
Other national polls give Obama a lead.
The other view of the race comes from recent polls in the battleground states that consistently show Romney running behind. Especially troubling are Obama's narrow leads in Ohio, Florida and Virginia, all vital to Romney's chances of winning.
But Romney advisers see a rush to judgment about the state of the campaign by pundits and commentators, and they dismiss suggestions that the campaign has taken a decisive turn. That view is shared in Chicago among Obama's top advisers, who believe they are in a stronger position than Romney but who expect the race to be close and hard-fought until November.
Besides, that view sells more newspapers.
And it's mandated by Journolist, under orders from Axelrod...
They included reports about the rising deficit, the poverty rate (which did not go down), manufacturing jobs (which fell) and the Federal Reserve's announcement that the economy would need sizable and indefinite help to create more jobs.
But - other than that - things are getting better as Obama moves 'Forward'.
"It's a very, very clear contrast," said one Romney adviser. "The water is not muddy on this. Obama has a worldview, and we've seen it through the first four years of his presidency, that every problem he encounters he solves by throwing more government money at it -- whether it's health care, whether it's the stimulus, whether it's the auto bailout."
Romney's advisers say they are not expecting an instant turnaround. "We're going to stay on it and keep pounding it," Gillespie said. "It may not be that it breaks through so much as it penetrates."
Although Romney has raised huge amounts of money for the general election over the past few months, he was at a disadvantage throughout the summer because he was short on money that he could spend before he formally accepted the nomination at his convention in Tampa.
Unlike the Campaigner in Chief, who has "the country's business" to attend to, while he's not campaigning.
His campaign team also made the decision -- questionable in the eyes of the Obama team -- to spend no money on ads during either convention. They didn't have the money to spend during the Republican convention and decided whatever they spent during the Democratic convention would be washed out by the media's coverage of events in Charlotte. As a result, according to a Romney adviser, they were outspent, campaign vs. campaign, $18 million to zero during that two-week period.
Sounds like a smart move to me, even though it flies in the face of Team Obama.
But they argue that the Obama team failed during the summer to knock out Romney and that the fact that he is still standing is evidence that voters are still looking for reasons not to reelect Obama. "They wanted to settle the race by August," Gillespie said. "It didn't work."
Obama advisers argue that was never their strategy. "That wasn't the goal," said Obama campaign manager Jim Messina. "The goal was to lay out a vision of where we want to take the country and to set up a choice, and that's exactly what we did."
Exactly per plan, by George! Just like the last four years!
"It's our plan to keep Romney around until election day, and by George it's working!"
Finally, near the end, a little semi-honesty from the WaPo -
The other obstacle Romney Âfaces is a campaign environment in which small and trivial matters can often dominate the daily discussion. Romney advisers believe Obama's campaign has been effective at feeding the media's appetite for such controversies and they recognize that avoiding those distractions or swatting them away must be an essential part of their overall strategy if they want to draw contrasts with Obama on big issues.
Maybe this is not quite as gloomy as the previous 98 parts.