It will be harder for Romney to close the gap if he’s branded as a loser. | REUTERS Mitt Romney, man of constant sorrow

Mitt Romney has become the 2012 election’s man of constant sorrow.

Since the beginning of the summer, the GOP presidential nominee has suffered from a seemingly endless stream of missteps and distractions, ranging from personal screw-ups to staffing flubs, to the supernatural hindrance of a hurricane during the Republican National Convention.


A video published Monday evening by the liberal magazine Mother Jones, showing Romney disparaging Obama supporters in a private fundraiser as people who consider themselves “victims” and “entitled” to government handouts, is only the latest unwanted disruption.

( Also on POLITICO: Video puts Romney on his back foot)

There was Romney’s botched foreign trip in July, when he drew ridicule by showing up in Britain on the eve of the Olympics and questioning London’s preparedness for the games. There was the final night of the Republican convention, when Hollywood legend Clint Eastwood rambled on stage for more than 10 minutes in national prime-time television. There was Romney’s own acceptance speech, which failed to mention the war in Afghanistan or acknowledge U.S. troops fighting abroad.

Romney spent last week litigating and defending his heated reaction to the U.S. embassy and consulate attacks in Egypt and Libya. Then, this week began with a pile-up of negative stories: first, POLITICO’s account of internal tensions in Romney’s campaign, centered on adviser Stuart Stevens, and the even more explosive Mother Jones video.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP split on Romney remarks)

Now, Romney heads into the final seven weeks of the campaign struggling to shed the aura of a candidate on the skids — an Inspector Clouseau-like figure who can’t perform the basic tasks of his job without getting into trouble. It’s an image wildly at odds with Romney’s background as a successful businessman and entrepreneur, the picture of managerial competence in the board room and the governor’s office.

Romney remains competitive with Obama in public opinion polls, but it’ll be exponentially harder for him to close the gap if he’s permanently branded as a loser in the eyes of political elites and the media.

“I would say this: if you’re going to have a story about internal campaign discord, and if you’re going to have an embarrassing video go public, you might as well have those things happen on consecutive days,” said Dan Schnur, the former spokesman for John McCain’s 2000 campaign who now head’s USC’s Unruh Institute of Politics.

( PHOTOS: 10 gaffes caught on mic)

Political strategists in both parties look on Romney with a combination of frustration and sympathy — and, among Democrats, undisguised glee. Some of Romney’s woes are genuinely of his own creation, but there’s also a recognition on both sides that the former Massachusetts governor is caught in a classic downward political spiral, where the perception of weakness drives one negative story after another, and political reporters compete ferociously to draw the most blood from a sinking candidate.

To break out of that cycle, Schnur said, Romney will have to do more than just wait for the latest bad news cycle to blow over.

“The only thing that plays bigger in the media than strategy stories is going big on substance — a big speech, a big policy announcement, a big challenge to Obama. A big something,” Schnur said. “It’s been a really bad stretch for them, but the polls are still relatively close.”

Democratic strategist Tracy Sefl, who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 primary campaign, said Romney has now been tagged as a political bungler: “There’s an ink stamp and the question is, how indelible is that ink?”

“It’s as if he’s wanted this job for so long and is so totally unprepared for the job interview,” she said, noting that Romney’s advisers have scarcely pushed back on the idea that their candidate is in a rough patch.

“You don’t see them calling ‘silly season’ on this,” Sefl continued. “The problem is, [Romney] is the cause of the silliness. He’s the one making the silliness, he’s the one approving Eastwood’s appearance [and] approving the half-baked statements and talking in private fundraisers in terms that are questionable.”

To Romney’s fiercest defenders, the whole arc of withering press coverage raises the prospect of media bias — the notion that reporters pounce on every opportunity to deride Romney as an imbecilic candidate while exalting the virtues of Obama and his cunning campaign.

It’s a complaint that John McCain and his advisers made vigorously in 2008. Not coincidentally, Democrats had a similar lament in 2000 and 2004, when their presidential candidates tried to no avail to beat back Republican attacks — and the media’s ravenous appetite for coverage of their vulnerabilities.

The level of Romney-bashing this fall is on an entirely different plane, argued Republican strategist Rick Wilson.

“Why doesn’t Barack Obama ever have a bad week?” Wilson asked rhetorically. “We’re in a situation where there is an increasing and obvious pile-on in the press and it is because an awful lot of the news media — it’s not just because they are liberals — it’s because they are herd animals.”

Continued Wilson: “It’s a psychological thing and there’s a psychological aspect of wanting to pile on the guy that they see as the person that is least like them … Well, Barack Obama is a guided missile into the brain of most reporters, he’s their fantasy, Aaron Sorkin president.”

Obama has hardly been gaffe-free in 2012: he drove his campaign off script early in the summer by declaring in the White House briefing room that private-sector business was “doing fine” and offered Republicans fodder by musing on the campaign trail that business owners are not individually responsible for their own success. That’s without even delving into the trove of material offered up by Vice President Joe Biden.

If there’s a feeding frenzy surrounding Romney, however, his campaign has repeatedly done its best to put blood in the water. As early as January, Romney was delivering inept public statements (“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me”) and his advisers were veering off-message on national television.

A top strategist, Eric Fehrnstrom, twice bungled major national interviews — first by suggesting in March that Romney could reset his public image like an “Etch A Sketch,” then in July by taking the position that the national health insurance mandate is not a tax. When the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA Action blamed Romney for a woman losing her health insurance and subsequently dying, Romney press secretary Andrea Saul reminded a Fox News interview that that woman would have been covered under Romney’s universal health care law in Massachusetts.

What’s more, the campaign infighting that broke into public view this week in POLITICO has simmered for weeks and months among frustrated members of the Romney team straining to help their candidate break through an apparent ceiling in the polls.

To the most circumspect members of the GOP, the accumulation of missteps by the Romney campaign have still not changed the fundamentals of the 2012 race, which favor a challenger candidate with strong credentials on the economy.

And whatever Romney’s shortcomings, Republicans are quick to point out that things aren’t nearly as chaotic on their side as they were four years ago, when in the space of a few weeks McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running mate, messed up his response to the global financial crisis and suspended his campaign.

“Compared to four years ago, the Romney campaign is a well-oiled, hard-working, highly competent and well organized effort. I would feel more comforted if Romney were leading in any of the swing states other than North Carolina,” said former New Hampshire Republican Party Chairman Fergus Cullen, who recalled of 2008: “You just felt the whole thing slipping away in September … You just started feeling the opportunity closing and I don’t feel that way about the Romney campaign at all.”

Still, Romney’s chronic errors and misfortunes probably aren’t helping matters.

Longtime Republican presidential strategist Charlie Black shrugged off the Mother Jones story as merely another uproar du jour and said Romney appeared to be handling the fallout effectively.

“Look, all these candidates make mistakes. It’s an honest mistake when you’re in a private meeting with a bunch of people and you don’t know you’re being recorded, and you’re giving some political analysis and you say something that doesn’t come out right,” said Black, speaking by phone from Florida where he was traveling with McCain on a campaign swing for Romney. “I don’t think it’s a big deal out here in the hinterlands.”

He added: “You don’t like distractions, whether you cause them or the other side causes them or world events cause them. But there’s no reason why this one should last long.”