Mr. Perfect Gets More Perfect All The Time

Mitt Romney is constantly working at making sure that all the right people like....no, adore....him.

The Long-Distance Runner - The Boston Globe

During his long presidential campaign, Romney -- the reformed Massachusetts moderate with the salesman’s too-perfect touch -- had struggled to earn a welcome into a conservative movement whose members were often suspicious of his motives. The plastic sleeves in the binder held the good news to emerge from his experience trying to win them over: typed or handwritten confirmation that hard work and collegiality meant something in politics.

With nearly metronomic precision, Romney seems to emerge monthly from the cuckoo clock he has constructed for his exile. Each time, he delivers a speech with a carefully calibrated new critique of the Democratic regime, and then retreats back to a lower-profile schedule of fund-raisers, Op-Eds, and diligent networking among Republicans nationwide.

Romney’s schedule is a testament to his measure and caution as he has worked to stay in front of crucial conservative constituencies and away from unnecessary squabbling on news shows. “He’s not a talking head, and he doesn’t want to be critic-in-chief,” says spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom. Romney turns down 95 percent of the media requests he receives and has refused to cooperate with what he calls “Romney-in-exile” profiles, including this one. “He is not a candidate, he is a private citizen,” says Fehrnstrom. “He does not want to invite or encourage speculation about 2012.”


When [Eric]Cantor unveiled his National Council for a New America, perhaps the most concerted of the efforts within the party to rebrand the Republican agenda, he had Romney by his side for the early May photo op. At a suburban Virginia pizzeria, Romney and former Florida governor Jeb Bush were perched on wooden stools as two of Cantor’s five “national experts”: a tableau of a smart, good-natured party in search of a common-sense future. The group’s founding documents promised “a conversation with America that seeks to remove ideological filters” on issues like health care, education, energy, national security, and economic issues. There was no mention of immigration, abortion, judges, or gay rights, and Republican leaders most popular with religious conservatives -- Palin and Huckabee, in particular -- were glaringly not included.
“He’s someone who is solutions-oriented. He’s about results, it’s about deliverables. He says: Let’s put a goal out there,” Cantor says of Romney. “So much of what our party needs right now is the respect that we can implement our conservative vision.”

As Romney advisers mined their 2008 experience for potential 2012 lessons, several rued the fact that he had been introduced nationally as an ideological purist and not as a businesslike pragmatist. Instead, his campaign focused too intently on winning over Iowa’s evangelical voters, for whom Romney’s Mormonism had likely been an insurmountable hurdle, aides concluded after the election. “If you’re looking for a mistake we made, we should have made [the campaign] more about competence,” says Ron Kaufman, a lobbyist and former White House official who advises Romney. “If a Republican can win in 2012, it will be because competence matters.”

So now, Mitt Romney is like Mike Dukakis -- "It's not about ideology, it's about competence."

Good luck with that, Mittens!!!