O’Donnell was paid for his work assisting Romney but was not offered a formal role. | AP, Reuters Romney splits with debate adviser credited for turnaround

A GOP operative who won plaudits for bolstering Mitt Romney’s recent debate performances is not being retained by the front-runner’s campaign, an apparent victim of internal tensions over staff receiving too much credit for the candidate’s comeback, POLITICO has learned.

Brett O’Donnell, a former top aide to Michele Bachmann, has been paid for his work assisting Romney in the crucial Florida debates but was not offered a formal role with the campaign as he expected, according to Republican sources familiar with the situation.


After O’Donnell was identified last week as advising Romney and then highlighted in subsequent news accounts as being one of the reasons behind the former Massachusetts governor’s improved debate performances, Romney campaign officials grew uneasy.

O’Donnell received phone calls late last week from two Romney advisers — campaign manager Matt Rhoades and informal adviser Charlie Black — where it was made clear that there was severe discomfort about how his role was being portrayed in the media and that he ought to tread lightly.

Then on Saturday, when The New York Times posted a Sunday story online detailing how Romney’s campaign targeted Newt Gingrich in Florida that again mentioned O’Donnell’s role with the debates, chief Romney strategist Stuart Stevens called O’Donnell. Stevens asked the adviser to contact Jim Rutenberg, one of the Times reporters who wrote the piece, and request that the reporter change the depiction of O’Donnell’s role in what would become a front-page article, according to Republican sources.

The Times altered some of the language relating to O’Donnell in the final story — he was mentioned briefly as only a “debate adviser” — but O’Donnell’s name was not removed. O’Donnell was not quoted in the story.

Reached on the phone by POLITICO Friday, O’Donnell declined to comment.

Stevens would only say: “I have a great deal of respect for Brett and would welcome the opportunity to work together again down on the road.”

But, according to the Romney campaign last week, O’Donnell was already part of the team.

A former Liberty University debate coach, O’Donnell worked for John McCain’s 2008 campaign and was a senior aide to Bachmann up until her withdrawal from the campaign last month. He’s well-regarded in the Republican operative world and is not generally known as a self-promoter.

Now, though, sources familiar with his thinking say he feels like he has become the fall guy after both senior aides and Romney himself expressed ire about the grab for credit generally and the much-buzzed-about Sunday Times story specifically.

O’Donnell’s understanding was that, following the Florida primary this past Tuesday, he would be tendered a formal offer to advise Romney on debates going forward.

But GOP sources say he was abruptly informed on Wednesday that he would be paid for his work to date but would not retained in any formal capacity.

The internal machinations come as Romney has reasserted himself as the GOP front-runner, but also as the buttoned-down candidate and Rhoades — the equally disciplined and leak-despising campaign manager — have grown uneasy about the focus on the tactics employed in the comeback.

Any presidential campaign places a high demand on loyalty to the principal, but the Boston high command is especially deferential to the man aides call “the gov.”

Much like President Obama’s campaign and the White House, Romneyworld prides itself on running a tight ship, minimizing unplanned leaks and keeping any staff drama to a minimum.

But also like Obama, Romney’s orbit can be tough to penetrate — most of the top aides in Boston, including Rhoades and Stevens, worked on Romney’s 2008 campaign. And there are egos at work when it comes to doling out credit.

That starts with the candidate.

Romney made his feelings jarringly clear when he was asked about the Times story in an interview Monday on the “Today” show.

“I think you can expect advisers to think that the work of advisers is very, very important, but frankly, I think if you’re to go back and look at where the sentiment changed, it was with the debates,” Romney told Matt Lauer.

And several sources in and close to the Romney camp said there had been deep consternation internally over the press O’Donnell received and the pre-emptive, how-we-did-it Times story, which quoted Romney adviser Russ Schriefer among others.

The piece, said one campaign insider, made the candidate himself “seem like an afterthought in reviving his own campaign.”

The campaign held a conference call this week, multiple sources said, in which a clear message was delivered — Romney pulled himself back from the brink after South Carolina, and no one else did it for him.

It was unclear whether O’Donnell was discussed on the call.

The O’Donnell affair began when the adviser was spotted by The New York Times’s Michael Shear at a Romney event in Florida last Monday — just before the first of two debates in the state.

Shear wrote an item in which Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul was quoted acknowledging that O’Donnell was now helping the campaign and a campaign official said O’Donnell was assisting with debate prep.

“Brett’s been working with us for some time, since Michele Bachmann got out of the race,” Saul said.

Saul told POLITICO the same thing in an email — that O’Donnell had been working with them since Bachmann bowed out.

Romney officials were apparently happy with O’Donnell’s advice. The adviser appeared in the spin room following Thursday’s Jacksonville debate and, in talking to this reporter and others, did what campaign operatives do: praised his candidate’s performance and disparaged his candidate’s rivals.

But after making the long haul from north Florida down I-95 to Miami to help prepare Bachmann for a Sunday appearance on “Face the Nation,” it became clear that Romneyworld was unhappy.

First there were the calls from Rhoades and Black, the latter of whom O’Donnell knows well from McCain’s campaign. Then, as O’Donnell attended a basketball game Saturday night in Miami, came the Stevens call where it was made clear the description of him as “debate coach” was chafing the campaign.

Romney officials retain warm feelings for O’Donnell, who initially began helping the campaign by just sending informal emails to aides offering advice. But the sense in Boston is that O’Donnell’s role was much less than how it was portrayed in press accounts and the narrative that he had arrived to turn around the candidate’s debate performances is at odds with reality.