We noted earlier that Mitt Romney's aides say he'll be out on the campaign trail more, a move rolled out through the AP, and Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei have more on the home page tonight - including the fact that the candidate and Paul Ryan will appear together more frequently:

The plan, described by top aides and advisers in interviews this week, is an acknowledgment that Romney is in enough of a hole that he cannot depend on the presidential debates to turn his candidacy around. In fact, Romney, who recently did five mock debates in a 48-hour period to practice up, has confided to advisers that it may be hard to win a debate because every attack against President Barack Obama will seem stale, while the attacks on him will seem fresher and newsier to a hostile media.

Instead, Romney plans to dial back on fundraisers and vastly increase his personal appearances – both on the stump and in ads – to convince what’s left of the undecided voters that Obama has been a disappointment and that he has a specific plan that is less risky than the status quo.

Rather than talk about the broader economy, Romney will increasingly talk about his plans in terms of the effect on families, the aides said. This started before the Republican convention, when he boiled his 59-point plan for the national economy down to a five-point “Plan for a Stronger Middle Class.”

The emerging strategy comes after several days of soul-searching. Romney officials are very clear-eyed about the damage done by two straight weeks of bad media coverage and the embarrassing comments caught on tape (see below for their assessment of what hurt the most in the past 10 days). They don’t dispute they are locked in serious turbulence, but also take solace that things are not worse after what they consider the darkest stretch of the campaign.

“We are going to look back at this as the week he got his act together, or the beginning of the end,” said a top Republican who works closely with the campaign.