But the Romney campaign has made its peace with — and in the general election may make a virtue out of — the fact that he remains despised by the far right. Among this segment is Iowa’s most prominent Tea Party activist, Ryan Rhodes, who told me that Romney’s campaign has not reached out to him and who also said, “You look at his health care plan, the fact that he hired people who lobbied for Solyndra — it takes those issues off the table that you could tie around Obama’s neck.” He went on: “I don’t think he has a major belief system. He’s Mitt Romney. He’s a manager, O.K.?”

In the past, Romney, an English major in college, was reluctant to let others put words in his mouth. But those running his campaign felt that his prose tended to accentuate Romney’s blandness and wasn’t a good use of his time. (“During the 2008 campaign,” one staff member says, snickering, “I used to tell people: ‘We’re not very happy with our speechwriter, and we want to fire him. His name’s Mitt, and he works on the third floor.’ ”) Stevens, who has made a second career out of writing dialogue for recurring TV characters, persuaded Romney to surrender the speechwriting responsibilities to him — and in recent weeks, Stevens in turn has deferred to the punchy prose of Lindsay Hayes, a former speechwriter for Sarah Palin.

Stevens has also played a hand in Romney’s much-lauded debate performances, which have buttressed the candidate’s assertion that he is best equipped to take on the rhetorically deft Obama. The previous campaign’s debate sessions were, says one adviser, “like an Economics 101 course in college, just a lot of people sitting auditorium-style with their computers.” This year’s prepping has involved fewer contributors conjuring sound bites. “All we do is argue,” says Stevens, who has coached Romney to not get entangled in the specifics of a question. Instead: Hear the topic, zone out the rest, say what you’re about, don’t get hung up on how the crowd responds. It’s not about the room. It’s about the answer.

Another Stevens maxim is “You’ve got to dig the ditch you’re going to die in” — or, less metaphorically, “You have to be willing to lose,” a slogan that he and Schriefer inscribed on a message board early on in the campaign. It’s a rousing sentiment that Romney has taken to heart in his forceful defense of the Massachusetts health care law that some admirers have begged the ex-governor to disavow. During such moments, Romney seems to project the confident air of a chief executive who spends little time fretting over what other people think.

More often, however, Mitt Romney the data-driven former corporate consultant seems like a man puzzling his way to victory, doing and saying whatever might solve the problem immediately at hand. In Iowa, I watched as the candidate confronted the dicey issue of ethanol subsidies at the Treynor business round table like a man who had no intentions of losing, dying, ditch-digging or anything else except ingratiating. First he stipulated that “I supported the subsidy of ethanol to help get the industry on its feet.” After qualifying that support by saying, “I didn’t feel the subsidy needed to go on forever,” Romney noted that the subsidy was due to expire in December anyway. He qualified that observation by remarking, “I might’ve looked at more of a decline over time. . . .” But, he cheerfully observed, “most people I know in the ethanol industry say, ‘Fine — we’re now up and going.’ ” Lest anyone doubt his commitment, Romney reminded his audience, “For me, ethanol is part of national security — it is part of America developing our own energy. . . . And I would like to see the ethanol industry continue to be successful to grow and to provide a growing share of America’s domestic energy sources.

“And how to do that,” he finished with an unsteady grin, “as Ross Perot used to say, I’m all ears!”

Among Stevens’s colorful analogies, the unlikeliest is one in which he compares Romney to Michael Vick, the dynamic quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles. “Michael Vick’s not a real good pocket guy,” Stevens told me. “So don’t tell him he can’t roll out. Try to make him the best rollout guy that’s ever played.” And indeed, Romney’s staff has endeavored to focus the campaign on his strengths, which are decidedly the opposite of Vick’s. So instead of letting their quarterback roam and improvise, they’re keeping him tightly contained in the business-centric pocket, hoping to God that he does not stray from it.

Romney has been spending a great deal of time lately with Republicans who want to like him. On Oct. 26, he met with 61 Republican members of Congress who had either already endorsed him or were considering doing so. “The thing I try to convey to my colleagues is, ‘Mitt Romney is not going to embarrass you — he’s the most vetted candidate out there,’ ” says Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who helped organize the gathering. In that sense, Romney did not disappoint. Though he devoted the bulk of his talk to the economy, he also made the point, Chaffetz says, “that in the general election he’s going to be very attractive to both Republicans and independents.”