Romney's strategy of keeping the focus on his opponent is becoming more difficult. Conservative griping over Mitt grows

The Romney campaign is grappling with an unexpected swell of Republican complaints about the former Massachusetts governor’s political operation, at least temporarily disrupting the legendarily disciplined message of the presumptive GOP nominee.

What began over the weekend with a few stray tweets from Fox News media baron Rupert Murdoch has grown into a larger chorus of criticism from the right over the deftness (or lack thereof) of Romney’s team.


On Thursday, Romney’s team put out word of a massive $100 million fundraising haul — but its skill in attracting donors has done little to tamp down longstanding concerns within the GOP about the insularity and rigidness of the Romney camp. Those gripes are now being aired in public, as center-right staples from The Wall Street Journal editorial page to conservative radio host Laura Ingraham lament what they view as an uninspired, passive campaign. Romney’s general-election approach has resembled the strategy he used during the GOP primaries, a keep-your-head-down, minimalist effort aimed at keeping the focus on his opponent. That’s been a greater challenge for Romney as he faces President Barack Obama instead of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum.

Murdoch set the second-guessing in motion when he wrote on Twitter that he met Romney last week and concluded that Obama “will be hard to beat unless [Romney] drops old friends from team and hires some real pros.”

( Also on POLITICO: Exclusive: Romney weighs foreign-policy tour)

Soon, Murdoch had company from another prominent GOP business titan. “Hope Mitt Romney is listening to Murdoch advice,” tweeted former General Electric CEO Jack Welch. “Playing in league with Chicago pols. No room for amateurs.”

The new round of Republican griping went into overdrive after the candidate’s senior adviser, Eric Fehrnstrom, declared in a Monday MSNBC interview that Romney considered the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate to be a penalty, not a tax. The stance put Romney at odds with the vast majority of Republican campaign groups, which have pummeled Obama since last week’s Supreme Court decision for allegedly breaking his pledge not to raise taxes.

It was also the second high-profile error by Fehrnstrom, a Massachusetts-based strategist who is close to Romney personally, but largely a newcomer to national politics — and who previously fell into hot water by saying Romney could reset his public image like an “Etch A Sketch.”

Romney overrode Fehrnstrom’s comments on the mandate in a Wednesday sit-down with CBS News, saying flatly that he considered the mandate a tax. But he also struggled to explain in substantive terms how the federal mandate differs from the insurance mandate he approved in Massachusetts, fueling conservative angst about his deftness as a standard-bearer.

The most acerbic denunciation came Thursday in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, which laced into Romney for running a reactive campaign and fumbling his response to the Supreme Court’s decision.

“The Romney campaign thinks it can play it safe and coast to the White House by saying the economy stinks and it’s Mr. Obama’s fault. We’re on its email list and the main daily message from the campaign is that ‘Obama isn’t working.’ Thanks, guys, but Americans already know that,” the Journal bellowed. “What they want to hear from the challenger is some understanding of why the President’s policies aren’t working and how Mr. Romney’s policies will do better.”

The paper continued: “Meanwhile, the Obama campaign is assailing Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch rich man, and the rich man obliged by vacationing this week at his lakeside home with a jet-ski cameo. Team Obama is pounding him for Bain Capital, and until a recent ad in Ohio the Romney campaign has been slow to respond.”

A number of Romney backers outside Boston, who were initially dismissive of Murdoch’s 140-character critiques, sounded more concerned Thursday as the cacophony of disapproval grew. Several said they feared the campaign, long criticized as excessively bunkered and candidate-driven, would react by digging in.

Asked if the campaign intended to respond to the gathering storm on the elite right, Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul emailed the statement she issued in response to Murdoch’s initial tweaking of Romney: ““Gov. Romney respects Rupert Murdoch and also respects his team and has confidence in them.”

Saul did not respond to a request for further comment on the broader range of criticism directed at Romney.

Romney adviser Kevin Madden had a glass-is-half-full view of the public commentary.

“If anything, it’s emblematic of everyone’s intensity and how much they want to win. Whether you’re inside headquarters for 20 hours a day or you’re supporting the campaign from the outside, you’re focused on winning and seizing every opportunity to make a gain or advance,” he said. “Both positive input and constructive criticism have always been abundant on any campaign and especially on presidential campaigns where so much is at stake. From a campaign viewpoint, it’s important to put it all in perspective, always be listening and measuring performance but, most importantly, use it to go out and meet or exceed the high expectations that people have for the campaign.”

It’s entirely possible that Friday’s jobs report — which is not expected to bring encouraging news for the White House — will silence Romney’s intra-party doubters and remind them that in a campaign defined by the issue of the economy, Romney’s narrowly tailored message still stands a decent chance of success.

After all, it was only a month ago that Obama’s campaign was viewed as haplessly sinking into a morass of bad jobs data. That was until the president announced a major shift in immigration policy, and before the news media saw public data demonstrating that his negative attacks on Romney were sinking in.

For now, conservative frustration continues to build. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol — like the Journal’s editorial page, an avowed Obama opponent who has also repeatedly criticized Romney — fumed over Romney’s missteps Thursday in a column titled, “Dukakis, Kerry … Romney?”

“So, speaking of losing candidates from Massachusetts: Is it too much to ask Mitt Romney to get off autopilot and actually think about the race he’s running?” Kristol asked. “He can ‘speak about’ how bad the economy is all he wants — though Americans are already well aware of the economy’s problems — but doesn’t the content of what Romney has to say matter? What is his economic growth agenda? His deficit reform agenda? His health care reform agenda? His tax reform agenda? His replacement for Dodd-Frank? No need for any of that, I suppose the Romney campaign believes. Just need to keep on ‘speaking about the economy.’”

Even before Fehrnstrom’s clumsy remarks, the campaign was drawing criticism for what some on the right felt to be a lackadaisical response to the shifting dynamics of the 2012 race. While the Obama campaign and super PAC have attacked Romney with paid ads for his record at the private equity firm Bain Capital, the Romney campaign did not air a direct response ad until last week.

And even then, Romney’s campaign only used 2008-vintage footage of Hillary Clinton to accuse Obama of peddling “vicious” and inaccurate attacks. The response ad did not include a positive defense of Romney’s business experience.

When The Washington Post published a lengthy story last month detailing how Bain had invested in companies that expanded their operations overseas while their U.S. presence contracted, the Romney team did not respond for days except in canned statements to the press.

The response that eventually came took the form of a request that the Post retract the story — a demand that the newspaper immediately rejected.

What’s most significant about the public hand-wringing about Romney is that it doesn’t merely reflect transient political circumstances: Fehrnstrom’s error and the overall sloppiness of Romney’s response to the Supreme Court’s health care decision are merely symptoms of what Republicans have long viewed as Romneyland’s shortcomings.

“They have always had big liabilities in their operation when it came to responding to attacks and now those weaknesses are being exposed. The Obama tax hike is one thing, but the slow response to the outsourcing story in the Post was probably one of the biggest instances of political malpractice in recent political history,” said one national GOP strategist, echoing numerous others.

“The campaign needs to become more nimble and forward-leaning ASAP from both a political and policy perspective or it isn’t going to be enough to beat a very beatable and weak incumbent in November,” the strategist said. “Romney’s inability to define himself, in the hopes of keeping this of a referendum election, have turned him into a blank canvas that is rapidly being painted by the Obama campaign.”

Republicans don’t all agree on what, exactly, Romney must do to set his campaign back on the right track. The common theme in their angst is simply: do something.

On her radio show, Laura Ingraham bemoaned Romney’s decision to take time off the trail and rest up at his vacation home in New Hampshire.

“This is the advisers telling him, ‘Oh, it’s fine, take a week,’” she said. “Should Romney call the cease-fire or get out there on the trail and get off the jet ski?”

Notably, the headlines have been linked prominently on the Drudge Report, whose proprietor, Matt Drudge, is known to have close ties to Romney’s camp.

The Murdoch commentary, on some level, was not a surprise — the media mogul, according to many people around him, has never been a Romney admirer, going back to his initial presidential run in 2008. And his New York Post was among the earliest media critics of Romney’s Bain tenure this cycle.

Nonetheless, a number of Republicans say the critical mass of public commentary reflects a larger issue. The daylight between Romney’s message on health care and the GOP’s “it’s a tax” mantra underscores the fact that he is not someone with deep ties to the Republican party — and the fact that he is doing little by way of fleshing out his policy plans isn’t helping.

“I worry the absence of policy comes from a general absence of passion/ideas,” said one Republican insider, who asked not to be identified criticizing the campaign. “I mean, what the hell does Mitt care about? What does he want to do? I don’t know.”