Day three of the “September surprise,” and things aren’t getting any better for our boy Willard. Awakening to a chorus of criticism on the nation’s editorial pages—except, of course, from the loyal Wall Street Journal—he was also greeted with new polls showing him trailing by ten points in Michigan and two points in Florida. Meanwhile, the search for senior Republicans willing to repeat his suggestion that the President is providing succor to America’s enemies continues.

So far, just about the only statements of support Romney has managed to elicit have come from discredited neocons (Bill Kristol, Liz Cheney), paleo-cons (Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton), and nutty-cons (Sarah Palin, Jim DeMint). Meanwhile, John McCain and Condoleezza Rice, arguably the G.O.P.’s two most influential voices on foreign policy, have conspicuously failed to criticize Obama, while paying tribute to Ambassador Chris Stevens, the longtime foreign-service officer who was killed.

About the best that can be said for Romney is that, responding to the public statements from the U.S. Embassy in Egypt, he took a cynical tactical gamble that misfired after the protests in Libya took a tragic turn. When you are losing an election that you should win you have to do something, and accusing a Democratic President of being soft on national security is a standard G.O.P. fallback.

Even this defense of Romney’s actions is a bit of a stretch. On Tuesday night, when his campaign released its initial statement, it was already clear that one U.S. consulate official in Benghazi had been killed, though the person’s name and job title weren’t yet known. Perhaps Romney was assuming it was a low-level employee, maybe not an American citizen. Still, going on the offensive in this manner before all the facts were known was inviting trouble. And if that was foolhardy, Romney’s decision on Wednesday morning to double down—this after the news emerged that Stevens and three other consulate officials had been killed—was virtually inexplicable. “It almost feels like Sarah Palin is his foreign policy adviser,” Matthew Dowd, a former political adviser to President George W. Bush, told the Washington Post. “It’s just a huge mistake on the Romney campaign’s part—huge mistake.”

Obama’s subsequent jibe that Romney “shoots first and aims later” hit home. But perhaps the most disturbing thing about this whole incident is that it wasn’t simply a spontaneous gaffe on the part of the G.O.P. candidate. It was debated and thought through. According to the same report in today’s Washington Post, Romney acted on the “unanimous recommendation of his foreign policy and political advisers.”

Think about that for a moment. Sometime on Tuesday evening, presumably, the best minds that Romney has gathered around him, convened by conference call, or offered their thoughts individually, and all of them thought it was a capital idea, solely on the basis of statements from the Embassy in Cairo, to accuse Obama and his Administration of expressing sympathy “with those who waged the attacks.” Not only that, but there’s no suggestion that the following morning—as Obama, Secretary of State Clinton, and others were busy paying tribute to Ambassador Stevens—any of these sages thought to call Romney up and persuade him to zip it.

Why? Well, it is widely thought that Romney’s political advisers aren’t the brightest bulbs—his entire campaign has been a litany of errors. What has been less remarked upon is the makeup of Romney’s foreign-policy team. For a former businessman who claims to willing to hire the best and smartest regardless of background, it is a remarkably unimpressive and ideologically driven group, consisting largely of washed up neocons and Cold Warriors, many of whom served in the Administration of George W. Bush.

On a day-to-day basis, Romney’s foreign-policy point man is Dan Senor, a former spokesman for the American government in Iraq, who wrote a book about Israel’s economy that Romney often cites. Senor, a longtime neocon, often travels with Romney. On Tuesday, according to a report from ABC News, he was travelling with Paul Ryan in order to brief him along with Reuel Marc Gerecht, another well-known neocon, and Jamie Fly, who worked at the National Security Council under George W. Bush. John Bolton is another important player in the Romney team. Often dismissed even on the right as a hirsute blowhard, Bolton appears to have persuaded Romney to take him seriously. A third influential adviser is Eliot Cohen, a professor at Johns Hopkins, who once worked for Paul Wolfowitz. Then there’s Bill Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard, who is also said to have Romney’s ear.

Kristol, Bolton, Gerecht, Cohen, and several other of the people who are listed as informal advisers on Romney’s Web site are former members of the Project for the New American Century, the neocon think tank that will forever be linked to the invasion of Iraq. Conspicuously absent from Romney’s foreign-policy advisory team are representatives of the less bellicose school of thinking that dominated Republican foreign policy before the neocons showed up. A few months back, in a piece entitled “Is There A Romney Doctrine?,” David Sanger, the Times’ veteran Washington correspondent, wrote this:

Curiously for a Republican candidate with virtually no foreign policy record, Mr. Romney has made little effort to court the old-timers of Republican internationalism, from the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III, George P. Shultz and even the grandmaster of realism, Henry A. Kissinger. And in seeking to define himself in opposition to President Obama, Mr. Romney has openly rejected positions that George W. Bush came around to in his humbler second term.

What are we to make of all this? One interpretation is that Romney is one of nature’s neocons—a soul mate of Wolfowitz and Kristol. I don’t think that’s right. From all that we know about his history, he is a fairly cautious and practical fellow, hardly the type to embark on ideological crusades. My theory is that in this area, as in others, Romney has demonstrated that he’s a poor politician, allowing himself to be co-opted and hoodwinked by the right.