The Romney campaign wobbles – but will it fall down?

Perhaps it’s inevitable. A bad month, a worse week, capped by the release of a video showing Romney heaping scorn upon the poor: it’s not surprising that there’s a search for someone to blame. The wobbles at the heart of the Romney campaign have been starkly revealed, with a report in Politico detailing the arguments over the roles of key strategists and aides.

But this is not just a tale of internal squabbling or a clash of personalities in what must be an incredibly high-pressured environment. This is really about Romney himself: CEO, if you like, of his campaign. This is, after all, a multi-million dollar business. If Bain Capital were in charge, would they be advising a radical change of course?

Campaigns are essentially about three things: the candidate, the message, and the orgainisation and groundwork. Let’s face it: the Republicans were never going to get excited about Romney. And crucially, they dropped the ball on trying to define his image, allowing the Democrats free rein to push home their out-of-touch rich guy image, tainted by tax issues and heartless outsourcing of American jobs.

Convention chaos

Efforts at the Republican convention to show Romney as a caring, compassionate man of principle, with a loving family and a history of helping those in need, were overshadowed by the clamour of conservative voices on social issues like abortion and marriage that might help fire up the base, but just reinforced the views of more moderate voters that the GOP is out of step with how most people are feeling.

Romney’s convention speech was flat and uninspiring, failed to mention anything about the Middle East or Afghanistan, which earned him yet more negative reaction, and was totally upstaged, first by a non-existent hurricane and then by the bizzare spectacle that was Clint Eastwood’s empty chair stunt.

Our campaign is doing well. Mitt Romney

If the campaign had really wanted to concentrate on the economy, blaming Obama for presiding over high unemployment and a soaring deficit, and detailing their own alternative plans for economic recovery, then they didn’t manage it: to top it all, this weekend, Romney’s only campaign event, a speech in the swing state of Colorado, had to be cancelled after a small plane crash put the airport out of action.

Conservative worries have been spilling out into the open for days. He may not be linked to the campaign, but editor of the Redstate.com blog Erick Erickson summed up the mood on much of the right when he wrote: “The Romney campaign isn’t functioning well. Lucky for you and me the election is not today. But something needs to happen in (campaign HQ) in Boston and I am less and less hopeful anything will happen.”

Bryan Fischer, from the American Family Association, told reporters that Romney should be leading by ten to fifteen points. “The fact that he’s not. is Mitt Romney’s problem. It’s because he has run such a lacklustre campaign that’s been so vague on ideas.”

At the Values Voters summit, an annual conservative gathering, on Friday, it was Paul Ryan who was sent out to gee up the troops. His message, resolutely against abortion, articulating his conservative vision for the future and promising specifics, was anything but vague. “We owe you solutions, we owe you ideas – and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”

Back to specifics

Team Romney has insisted there will be no shake-up, no heads rolling. Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist-slash-speechwriter-slash-advertising guru is safe, for now. And Mitt seems to keep his close friends and trusted advisors around him for keeps.

Brushing aside claims of infighting, Romney told the Spanish language Telemundo: “My senior campaign people work extraordinarily well together. I work well with them. Our campaign is doing well.”

In a conference call on Monday, they promised a return to specifics: insisting that there really would be a focus on the economy. Honest. Two new political ads have been produced, one slamming Obama’s record, but the other more positive, talking about the Romney-Ryan plans to create 12 million jobs, help small businesses to grow and tackle the spiralling national debt.

But the polls are not looking good: Obama, ahead in seven out of the nine swing states – questions not just about Romney’s leadership but the way he has been managing his own campaign. Intrade, which has set up a futures-based market taking bets on the election outcome, has now put the odds of Obama winning at 67.4 per cent with Romney trailing in the wind.

Even the moneyed professionals of Wall Street are leaping off the sinking Republican ship: as Market Watch points out, traders do like to back a winner. And at the same time as that clip of Romney slating the 47 percent of non-income tax paying Americans, came more from that secret video filmed at the Florida fundraising event.

The footage, posted by Mother Jones magazine, shows Romney holding forth on the Middle East, a subject which has not been kind to him in recent days. “The Palestinians have no interest whatsoever in establishing peace”, he declared, before warning that a path to peace is “almost unthinkable to accomplish”.

Read more: There he goes again as Romney insults the poor

And there’s more: Romney also jokes about his parentage, quipping that if he had “been born of Mexican parents, I’d have a better shot of winning this”. On a week when he had planned a major push for the Hispanic vote.

White noise of denial

It’s all getting awfully familiar: days spent fending off negative press coverage, muffling the message beneath the white noise of hasty denials. Some conservatives are of the opinion that this could actually be a positive thing: Romney standing up against the liberal hand-wringers, doling out welfare cheques to massed ranks of undeserving poor.

But there are now less than seven weeks of campaigning: forty nine days to energise the party, rally the base, and woo that narrow sliver of voters who, believe it or not, have yet to make up their minds.

This is not yet the end for Mitt Romney. And the admittedly right-leaning Rasmussen actually gives him a slight edge over Obama. But from the vast majority of polling evidence – he’s not winning, and more importantly, he’s not acting like a winner, either.

Felicity Spector writes about US politics for Channel 4 News