Romney is increasingly projecting the aura of a loser. | REUTERS Romney fights 'loser' label

Many Republican political professionals are worried that Mitt Romney’s public image is now defined by a word never associated with winning presidential campaigns — weakness — and are urging him to take dramatic steps to recast his reputation between now and the fall.

The advice, echoed in interviews with numerous influential GOP figures, comes as Romney finds himself tormented by a contradiction: With each passing day of the primary season, he is coming closer and closer to being presidential nominee — and seemingly further and further away from being president.


Romney has the math of a winner, steadily building his lead in delegates against two main rivals, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who in the view of most GOP campaign veterans have no plausible path to the nomination.

Increasingly, however, he is in a variety of ways tangible (polls) and intangible (public hand-wringing among top Republicans) projecting the aura of a loser — someone who over months of campaigning is seen as less commanding in his leadership style, and less plausible as a future occupant of the White House, than he was when he started.

“It’s a slow, methodical process that starts with recognizing that the primary process has decimated his fave/unfave and that he needs to begin the rebuilding,” said Republican operative Steve Schmidt, of the rehabilitation Romney must begin as he moves toward the general election.

There is no easy formula for projecting strength, or coaxing skeptical voters to look anew at a leader, but Washington is increasingly rife with speculation about how Romney should do it. The No. 3 Republican in the House, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), said that to elevate himself Romney needs “a direct interaction with the president” and to start moving beyond the tit-for-tat engagement with his GOP rivals.

“If I was him, now I’d focus everything on the president. I’d ignore the others and start to try to find that moment with the president,” said McCarthy, urging Romney to begin a series of major speeches contrasting himself with President Barack Obama. “It’ll take time to break through. But I would take it issue by issue, do one per week.”

Another veteran Republican strategist, Alex Castellanos, said the front-runner’s urgent task is to shoo away his reputation for timidity and pandering with a “moment of strength,” by picking a high-risk, high-profile fight over some important principle.

He lamented that in Michigan Romney hadn’t held up his opposition to the auto bailout or throughout the campaign more forcefully defended his Massachusetts health care plan — both opportunities to spotlight his political courage.

“Here’s a guy whose biggest weakness is, shall we say, his generous flexibility,” said Castellanos, who worked for Romney in 2008. “But he never said, ‘Doing what’s right is more important than doing what’s popular.’ That wasn’t the narrative.”

Explained Castellanos: “It’s hard for him because he’s such a pleaser. He’s a genuinely nice and civil guy. He doesn’t chew tobacco, spit and hit you in the eye.”

History offers some solace to Romney. Among the precedents of candidates who were seen as too weak and too damaged to win, even as they wrapped up their party nominations, is Bill Clinton. He was in third place — behind the incumbent George H.W. Bush and independent Ross Perot — in the spring of 1992, after a grinding primary contest in which his character and record were ceaselessly pummeled.

The third way for Romney to chase away his reputation for weakness or expediency is through artful improvisation, using an unexpected crisis to project a presidential style. Obama was widely credited for a poised performance during the early days of the financial meltdown in 2008, while John McCain set himself back with statements that seemed harried and irrelevant.

But other past elections offer cause for alarm in Romney ranks. Usually, once a politician takes on an aroma of hopelessness he keeps it. Bob Dole in 1996 limped to his nomination with few people expecting he would make a real race of it against Clinton, and he never did. Al Gore and John Kerry came up short in their 2000 and 2004 bids in part because they came to be defined in the public mind by traits — excessive calculation, awkward demeanors — that are perilously close to the way Romney is viewed.

Clinton and others who have “changed the narrative,” in the parlance of politics, did it by showing creativity and keen intuition under pressure, instincts that Romney is not especially known for.

But Republicans who assume Romney is the eventual nominee and wish him well say there are, broadly speaking, three ways that Romney can chase away his image of weakness in time for the general election.

One would be his selection of a vice presidential nominee. These choices can be transformative, as Clinton’s selection of Gore was in 1992 — overnight causing millions of Americans to take a fresh look at a ticket of two moderate Southerners and putting Clinton in command of the race. Far more often, however, the selection of a running mate amounts to a shrug of the shoulders in the larger trajectory of a race. And when the pick becomes consequential — as with people like Democrat Geraldine Ferraro in 1984 or Republican Sarah Palin in 2008 — it is because the running mate becomes a damaging distraction.

Another way for presidential candidates to give themselves image make-overs is some kind of highly visible conflict — including, if opportunity presents, with someone on their own side.

“How do you find a moment of strength?” asked Castellanos. “You stand up to either your friends or your opponents.”

The consultant said Romney missed a window in recent days by not standing up in a very visible way to talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh, a darling of conservatives, to censure him for insulting a woman who spoke out in favor of contraceptives being covered by insurance. Alternatively, he advised, Romney could get off the defensive over his record of firing workers during his business career with a kind of damn-right strategy. Under this scenario, the former investment banker might stand in front of some federal agency and promise to shut it down the same way he did unprofitable businesses.

Unexpected crises are a bit hard to schedule, of course. But veterans of presidential campaigns say there are inevitably moments when a nominee will get a chance to have voters imagine him in the Oval Office.

“There will be several important events that will transpire across the campaign where he has an opportunity to step outside the caricature that has been drawn of him and reintroduce himself to the American people,” said Schmidt. “It begins with the period when he becomes the de facto nominee but before the convention, when other Republican candidates disappear from the race. He can begin to articulate a message that is hopefully positive, optimistic and that includes substantive detail about economic growth and how to create prosperity.”

The problem is not simply that Romney’s momentum is being drained by a long primary. Obama slogged through a long primary in 2008, long after he was widely viewed as the all-but-certain nominee, but for the most part was not deeply wounded by the process. In Romney’s case, the primary process is serving to systematically highlight some of his defects. If he doesn’t work to repair his image, those defects could remain defining in the fall.

“Voters really do separate primary elections from the general election,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.). “No presidential candidate in my lifetime has lost because he was ‘damaged’ in the primary. They lose because the other candidate is better, the environment is bad, the candidate is flawed or they ran a terrible general election campaign.”

The Pew Research Center last September found Romney and Obama split among registered voters, with 48 percent each. In each of three polls since, the president’s lead over Romney has widened. As of February, Romney trailed Obama, 44 percent to 52 percent.

The NBC/Wall Street Journal poll has found a similar trend. Obama led Mitt Romney among registered voters, 50 percent to 44 percent, in a poll this month. Last summer, by contrast, Obama had just a 1-point lead, 46 percent to 45 percent.

Other numbers in the NBC/Journal poll were equally troubling for Romney.

Republican voters were asked to describe their greatest concern if Romney wins the nomination. The most selected response, by 18 percent, was, “He waffles on issues and does not take a position.”

This was seen as more of a problem than his difficulty relating to average voters. But that’s also a problem. In the exit polling in this week’s Ohio primary, Santorum beat Romney 34 percent to 22 percent on the question of who Republican primary voters think best understands the problems of average Americans.

Whit Ayres, a GOP consultant, said the good news for Romney is that little is static in a general election contest, and some opportunities to change the narrative — the conventions and the general election debates — are certain to happen.

“For a ‘planned’ moment, the convention offers the best venue, with supposedly unenthusiastic Republicans cheering wildly for an uplifting speech contrasting The Romney Vision versus The Obama Vision for a new America,” Ayres said.

A swing-state Republican chairman, speaking on a not-for-identification basis, pleaded with the Romney campaign to realize the best way to change the narrative is to shift attention elsewhere.

“November is not about Mitt,” this official said, “it’s about Obama.”