It's a ruse to make you in the middle think Mitt is a moderate!
"Mitt Romney’s team taking fire from right; Key conservatives question decisions campaign is making" by Matt Viser | Globe Staff, July 05, 2012
WASHINGTON — Prominent conservative Republicans excoriated Mitt Romney’s campaign Thursday, publicly ridiculing his longtime core team of advisers — “the Boston boys,” as the Wall Street Journal labeled them — and suggesting they are bungling the presidential race.
“Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running?” asked Bill Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard.
The PNAC puke Bill Kristol is out repping for the right again, huh?
The intraparty dissent has been simmering for several weeks, but the presumptive nominee’s struggle to articulate a response to last week’s Supreme Court ruling on health care inflamed critics.
See: Taxed by Obamacare Coverage
Specifically, the conservatives called on the campaign to start articulating a broader vision for what Romney would do as president, speak about something else besides the economy, and forcefully counter the Obama campaign’s attacks.
Much of the blame was directed at Romney’s aides, many of whom have been with him since his 2002 gubernatorial race in Massachusetts. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, an influential forum of conservative thought, called the stuttering response to the health ruling amateurish. “The campaign looks confused in addition to being politically dumb,’’ the editorial said, adding his “insular staff and strategy . . . are slowly squandering an historic opportunity.”
Several Republicans even poked at Romney’s advisers for allowing him to take a weeklong family vacation at his home in Wolfeboro, N.H., where he was photographed riding a Jet Ski driven by his wife, Ann.
“This is his advisers,’’ conservative commentator Laura Ingraham said Thursday on her radio show. “This is not Romney, this is the advisers telling him, ‘Oh, it’s fine. Take a week.’ There’s no week to spare! We have a country to save!”
Related: Mitt Romney's Weekend
Several of the critics — including Kristol; the Wall Street Journal; and its owner Rupert Murdoch — have never been extremely supportive of Romney. But the fact that the former Massachusetts governor is still taking fire from Republicans several weeks after he had appeared to unite his party could be a problem as the campaign prepares for a furious final few months.
Like they aren't going to vote for him?
Related: Rupert Murdoch to Mitt Romney: Drop the ‘old friends’ from your campaign and hire ‘some real pros’
Murdoch’s recent swipes at Romney don’t jibe with facts
Rupe acts just like his papers!
Romney’s campaign downplayed the criticism, insisting there would be no shakeup within the tight-knit group of advisers. There also were attempts to protect Eric Fehrnstrom, the adviser who has become one of the public faces for the campaign.
One aide noted that it was senior strategist Russ Schriefer — not Fehrnstrom — who was in the meeting that seemed to provoke Murdoch’s ire and led to this tweet earlier this week: “Met Romney last week. Tough O Chicago pros will be hard to beat unless he drops old friends from team and hires some real pros. Doubtful.”
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Several Republicans also defended the Romney campaign, saying a lot of the strategic criticism is inside baseball coming on a holiday week when most average voters are not paying attention....
The thrust of the criticism from the Wall Street Journal was over how Romney has handled the week after the Supreme Court upheld Obama’s health care law. The editorial criticized the campaign’s “lame jujitsu spin” on the issue....
By Thursday morning, Kristol joined in the attacks, comparing Romney’s campaign to other losing bids from Massachusetts (Michael Dukakis in 1988, and John Kerry in 2004) and saying the candidate was being too timid.
“Adopting a prevent defense when it’s only the second quarter and you’re not even ahead is dubious enough as a strategy,” Kristol wrote on the Weekly Standard website. “But his campaign’s monomaniacal belief that it’s about the economy and only the economy, and that they need to keep telling us stupid voters that it’s only about the economy, has gone from being an annoying tick to a dangerous self-delusion.”
It's the Bill Clinton strategy, right?
“What is his economic growth agenda? His deficit reform agenda? His health care reform agenda? His tax reform agenda? His replacement for Dodd-Frank?” Kristol added. “No need for any of that, I suppose the Romney campaign believes.”
Kristol has been a frequent critic of Romney’s campaign but recently joined him for a retreat the Romney campaign held for top donors and supporters in Park City, Utah.
Oh, so THIS IS a STAGED and SCRIPTED piece of POLITICAL STRATEGY they COOKED UP WEEKS AGO!!
Less than two weeks before he would use his magazine’s website to blister Romney, Kristol sat for a panel discussion on “media insight.”
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