A POLITICO report touched off a flood of commentary on Romney's campaign. Blogs pounce on Romney's stumbles

The good ship Romney has sprung a leak, but pundits are divided on how close it is to sinking.

POLITICO’s report Sunday about the missteps inside Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign touched off a flood of commentary among conservatives and in the blogosphere on Monday - everything from there’s no cause for alarm to a loss of faith in a GOP nominee who seems destined for defeated.


While divided on top strategist Stuart Stevens’ responsibility for the bungling, most commentators agreed the bombshell story reflected poorly on Romney’s management skills - and on his staffers’ loyalty.

“[W]hen the Politico is running stories like this followed by Stevens says he will shift strategy but all is hunky-dory, what you have going on is a campaign sensing disaster and the rats fleeing the ship,” RedState’s Erick Erickson wrote. “The charlatans are trying their best to get their reputations cemented now to cover their butts before the butt of the ship points up prior to sinking. Things like this do not happen when staff are focused on getting the candidate elected. Things like this happen when staff is focused on themselves.”

“Obviously worst part of Politico story is not any actual details—They rejected my speech!—but fact that insiders are kvetching, attacking each other, making campaign look bad. Never a good sign. Not a good reflection on Romney the manager, either,” the Washington Examiner’s Byron York concurred.

“I’ve been believing Mitt Romney’s a great manager, and he’d be a great manager as president,” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Monday on “Morning Joe.” “You look at the people around him, the organization, it’s absolute disarray. It’s in absolute disarray.”

Several bloggers — including liberals and moderates — insisted the sources for the story missed the mark by pinning the blame solely on Stevens: Romney is trailing because of something wrong with the candidate, or with modern conservatism itself.

“The Romney campaign has a messaging problem because it has a policy problem,” The Daily Beast’s David Frum wrote on Twitter. “The policy problem is that the Romney campaign offers nothing but bad news to hardpressed Americans and the broader middle class.”

Slate’s Matthew Yglesias argues no matter how skilled Stevens was at message-crafting, he can’t overcome the legacy of George W. Bush’s poor economy. And Bloomberg’s Jonathan Alter determined Stevens has the “right strategy—steady focus on Obama economy—but wrong candidate to execute it.”

A third group called for calm, chalking up the story to the struggles of a trailing but far-from-doomed campaign, or arguing leaks are common and expected.

“That a piece like this was coming is predictable,” The Week’s Marc Ambinder wrote. “Campaigns that appear in trouble tend to give birth to them at just about the same time every cycle. And the Republican field is fertile with consultants who don’t like Romney, who think that Romney’s consultants, primarily Stuart Stevens, are too cosmopolitan for the sensibilities of the Republican Party, and who like to see their observations appear in print.”

Mark McKinnon, the ad guru during Bush’s successful 2000 run, recalled that campaign’s “Black September.”

“All the guns started shooting at us, everybody wanted me fired because the ads were terrible and the campaign was going down the drain,” McKinnon said on MSNBC. “They wanted all our heads. There was a lot of talk on internal dissension. And then a couple of weeks later, due to the debates, and a number of other external factors and factors within the campaign, because the campaign didn’t panic, we were able to right the ship. I think it’s way too early to be writing off the Romney campaign.”