Romney Team Is Both Defiant and Realistic
Romney Team Is Both Defiant and Realistic
After one of their worst weeks of the general election campaign, Mitt Romney and his advisers are scrambling to refocus their message and make up ground lost to President Obama in several battleground states.
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.”
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 doubters inside their own party and elsewhere, and to demonstrate that they have a compelling message, along with a strategy and the discipline to execute it.