Critics on the right have included Murdoch, Lowry, Noonan and Kristol. | AP Photos Conservative elites club Mitt

In case you hadn’t noticed, there are some on the right who are less than wild about Mitt Romney.

The former Massachusetts governor has at times been the subject of withering criticism from conservatives since he started his presidential campaign. But in the past few weeks, the critiques have reached new levels of intensity, as columnists, commentators, operatives and donors fret that Romney is losing control of the 2012 debate amid a Democratic assault on his personal finances and stewardship of Bain Capital.


( Also on POLITICO: 6 facts about Bain Capital)

Most of the criticism falls into one of several categories: Romney’s not a reliable conservative. He’s inarticulate about policy and light on vision. He’s not tough enough for a presidential campaign. The aides who surround Romney aren’t up to the job.

Romney heard plenty of that during the Republican nomination fight and won anyway. So far during the general election, his campaign has seemed untroubled by the barbs from the top 1 percent of thought leaders on the right.

And yet the darts keep coming each time Romney stumbles. Here’s the POLITICO user’s guide to Romney’s most persistent elite critics (all of whom, by the way, are even more fiercely critical of President Barack Obama):

Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer’s column and Fox News appearances have sizzled since 2008 with ideological denunciations of the president, making the pundit a North Star for conservatives at the height of Obama’s power.

It’s an obvious frustration to Krauthammer that Romney hasn’t managed to formulate a clear case against Obama in the 2012 campaign.

In mid-June, Krauthammer described Romney as a “stolid, gaffe-prone challenger for whom conservatism is a second language” (though clearly preferable to Obama, an incumbent whose “policies — Obamacare, the stimulus, cap-and-trade — he hardly dare mention.”)

Krauthammer’s concerns about Romney are tactical as well as ideological. In addition to Romney’s limitations as a conservative messenger, Krauthammer has bemoaned the Bay Stater’s lack of facility at the basic blocking and tackling of politics.

“These attacks are utterly shameless,” he said last week of Obama’s Bain and taxes messaging. “I think [Romney] needs to be much tougher on them. I think they ought to stress the fact that these are lies and repeat that.”

At the beginning of July, Krauthammer recited a list of Obama’s economic policies on Fox and dryly concluded that with all that evidence at Romney’s disposal, “If he can’t make the argument, he doesn’t deserve to win the election.”

Rich Lowry

The National Review editor has been less florid in some of his critiques of Romney than others, but he has been every bit as consistent in trying to hold the presumptive nominee’s positions to the light for examination.

Clear in his choice of words and in his ability to pinpoint the candidate’s weaknesses, Republicans have privately acknowledged for months that Lowry has been on point in his critiques of what has ailed Romney.

He made clear as Bain was emerging as an issue in the primaries that Romney’s task at the firm was wealth creation, not jobs, and that the candidate would need to find a way to sell that to voters as a relevant skill. One of Lowry’s most memorable columns of the cycle came after an Anderson Cooper-moderated CNN debate in October.

“It might have been Mitt Romney’s most revealing moment in all the Republican debates. Badgered by Texas governor Rick Perry, who was continually interrupting him, Romney appealed to CNN moderator Anderson Cooper to reassert the rules of the debate: ‘Anderson?’ That one-word plaint could stand for all of Romney’s straight-arrowness. It is a virtue and a curse.”

Lowry made a positive case for Romney a few months back, suggesting Romney merely needed to be “likable enough” and remind voters that he’s never failed at a job. When Obama debuted the Bain attack line against Romney, Lowry wrote that it was “cheap and unworthy, all that can be said about the attack on Bain is that it meets the standards of the Obama reelection campaign.”

And yet more recently, Lowry has publicly urged Romney to base his campaign more on ideas. As a torrent of criticism opened against Romney from the right two weeks ago, Lowry told CBS: “Something like this was inevitable, but I think the thrust of the criticism is sound.”

“There’s a general sense on the right that a more substantive campaign would be better,” he said.

Peggy Noonan

The former Reagan speechwriter turned Wall Street Journal columnist hasn’t been Romney’s most frequent critic. But when Noonan has taken aim at Romney, the shots have left a mark.

Of the conservative elites lamenting Romney’s shortcomings, none matches Noonan for the precision and intimacy of her criticism. In March, in the course of pondering Romney’s political sophistication, Noonan homed in on “a small but telling aspect of his public speaking style.”

“There is something strangely uninflected there. He says very different things in the same tone. ‘Pass the mustard!’ ‘This means war!’ ‘Flowers are pretty!’ ‘Don’t tread on me!’” she wrote. “It’s all the same tone, the same level of import and engagement. Which it would be if you’re sort of … well, if you see issues as entities to deploy as opposed to think about and weigh.”

More recently, Noonan bemoaned Romney’s “tendency to litter his speeches with applause lines,” warning Romney that he risks losing voters: “If all it is is applause lines, they’ll turn away.”

It’s a critique consistent with what the Republican upper crust, in general, worries about with Romney, though Noonan delivers hers on occasional Fridays with an especially literary flair.

Rupert Murdoch

The News Corp chairman has long been an influential voice on the right. But he’s never been as unfiltered as in the 2012 cycle, during which he has been among the thousands of political watchers who’ve discovered the magic of Twitter.

“When is Romney going to look like a challenger? Seems to play everything safe, make no news except burn off Hispanics,” was the warning shot Murdoch fired on his Twitter feed on June 24, followed quickly by: “Easy for Romney to spell out restoration of the American dream and bash incompetent administration. But not a word!”

A week later, on July 1, Murdoch went further: “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.”

So what was going on? As POLITICO first reported, Murdoch’s meeting with Romney was at a fundraiser hosted by Home Depot founder Ken Langone, where he and others asked the candidate about immigration, a signature issue for the mogul. Murdoch told Romney he needed to “take the fight to Obama” on the subject, according to attendees.

The history there is deeper than a single meeting. Murdoch, known for his array of tough-edged news outlets, has never been overly impressed with Romney as a candidate, according to several people close to both men. Romney ran against, and failed to take out, Murdoch nemesis Sen. Ted Kennedy in 1994. And in February 2011, his New York Post was also one of the first outlets to explore Bain Capital as a problem for Romney. Murdoch, his allies say, has always been more of a business pragmatist than an ideologue.

Mostly, though, Murdoch has issues with what he perceives as a lack of fight in the Romney campaign — a refrain increasingly heard elsewhere.

George Will

Most Romney skeptics on the right feel the need to include some caveats in their criticism: Romney’s far better than Obama. Romney has a good underlying message. Romney will still probably win.

Not George Will. On Sunday, he was asked on ABC’s “This Week” who was winning the debate over Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of tax returns.

“Mitt Romney’s losing at this point, in a big way,” Will said on ABC on Sunday. “Republicans have now nominated someone from the financial sector at a time when the financial sector is an extremely bad odor.”

Even that is a mild version of what Will said about Romney during the GOP primaries, dubbing him the Republican Michael Dukakis — a “technocratic” candidate without ideological moorings.

“Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate,” Will wrote last October. “Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?”

The Republican Party did settle for Romney. Will, at least so far, hasn’t come to terms with him.

William Kristol

The Weekly Standard editor has never been a Romney guy.

He was critical of the GOP front-runner throughout the primary, calling for other entrants to the race such as Paul Ryan and Mitch Daniels. For months, Kristol was something of a one-man public draft movement for a fleet of anyone-but-Romneys.

In the final weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Kristol wrote insistently that Romney was “evitable” and suggested that Newt Gingrich, or maybe someone else, could topple him.

“Or, if Iowa (January 3), New Hampshire (January 10) and South Carolina (January 21) produce fragmented results, and the state of the race is disheartening to Republicans, a late January entry [I’d now say an early February entry] by another candidate isn’t out of the question,” he wrote in that piece.

Kristol has called for more details from Romney, pushing him to address debt and deficit reduction, two mainstays of the Republican platform. He has urged Romney to be more aggressive in defining himself, both politically and in terms of policy. Kristol is not among the foreign policy hawks who have called on Romney to jump in front of every moving target — in fact, he called Romney foolish for doing just that during the fast-moving events surrounding Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng’s initial involvement with U.S. officials.

But Kristol has consistently pushed Romney to be bolder, or at least be more vocal about conservative fiscal ideology.

For a time, after Romney became the presumptive nominee, Kristol appeared to move toward rapprochement. He recently attended the mega-event for more than 800 donors the Romney campaign staged in Park City, Utah. The Romney-Kristol glasnost changed with a recent Weekly Standard piece in which he compared Romney with Northeastern Democratic losers like Dukakis and John Kerry.

“Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running?” Kristol wrote in blunt terms. The criticism was nothing new, but it came during a period in which open negative assessments from the right were growing.

Kristol, in an email to POLITICO, said he has one goal in mind with his commentary: “What I say is what I believe, and I hope it’s taken as constructive criticism. I’m aware that many politicians and their staffs consider that term an oxymoron, but they shouldn’t.”