I WOULD have considered this unlikely if I hadn't read it in the pages of a trustworthy newspaper:

Mitt Romney on Monday plans to refocus his campaign on tackling the US budget deficit, even as a media report highlighted concerns among some Republicans that his campaign was stumbling six weeks before the presidential election.



The Republican presidential nominee is expected to tell the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles that his deficit-reduction plan will cut $500bn a year in government spending by the end of his first term...



He will also criticise President Barack Obama for promising – but failing – to deliver on his campaign promise to pass immigration reform in his first year in office.



“Despite his party having majorities in both houses of Congress, the president never even offered up a bill,” Mr Romney says. “I will work with Republicans and Democrats to permanently fix our immigration system.”

There are two problems with Mr Romney's choice of the themes of deficit reduction and immigration reform. The first is deficit reduction. The second is immigration reform. Mr Romney can't win on either of these themes. He can't win on deficit reduction because his tax and spending plans, sketchy as they remain, will either increase the deficit or increase taxes on the middle class; his denials that this will happen lead quickly into a maze of mathematically irreconcilable claims that, if they don't necessarily refute his claims, do confuse voters and neutralise his argument. Deficit-cutting is a weak issue, less important to voters than employment or personal income, but it used to be the one economic issue where Mr Romney could count on a consistent advantage over Barack Obama; now, even that's no longer the case.

And he can't win on immigration reform because he's barely talked about immigration reform, he represents a political party that has largely been co-opted by a fervid anti-amnesty movement, and when he has talked about the issue he's vowed to veto the DREAM Act and used terms like "self-deportation". He trailed Barack Obama among Hispanics by 64% to 27% as of late August.

The big story driving the news cycle Monday morning is Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei's article in Politico, "Inside the campaign: How Mitt Romney stumbled", on the disarray over the past few weeks in Mr Romney's campaign. They report that Stuart Stevens, the campaign's chief strategist, scrapped the convention speech he'd commissioned eight days earlier from Peter Wehner, a top Republican speechwriter, "setting off a chaotic, eight-day scramble that would produce an hour of prime-time problems for Romney, including Clint Eastwood’s meandering monologue to an empty chair." To judge from today's attempted reboot, Mr Romney is still stumbling.

This of course is just horserace reporting. It'd be easy enough to write the whole thing off as a mediocre candidate with an unexpectedly poor campaign team. Frankly, I don't think that's what's going on here, and I don't think either Mr Romney or Mr Stevens are entirely at fault. Take the themes they're focusing on today. On the deficit, Mitt Romney didn't invent the mathematically irreconcilable trifecta of promising massive tax cuts, no reductions in Medicare or defence spending, and lower deficits; Republicans have been running on that platform since Ronald Reagan. It's the policy incarnation of the splits between three of the party's constituencies: the wealthy, the defence establishment, and the elderly. On immigration, Mitt Romney didn't drive the anti-immigration wave that has swept through the GOP over the past decade; he's simply been forced to go along with it. His incoherence on this subject is the policy incarnation of the split between three of the party's constituencies: conservative Hispanics (including Cubans) and pro-immigration business elites, on the one hand, and ethnically nationalist whites, on the other. What we're seeing here is not simply a flailing campaign run by a mediocre candidate. It's a campaign trying to cope with the fact that the fundamental coalitions and policy bargains its party represents are falling apart.

(Photo credit: AFP)