CNN HOST: Is there a concern that Santorum and Gingrich might force the governor to tack so far to the right it would hurt him with moderate voters in the general election. ERIC FEHRNSTROM (ROMNEY CAMPAIGN SPOKESMAN): Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

As the Romney campaign shifts to the general election, his aides will reintroduce him to voters, warming up his image by emphasizing his role as a devoted father and husband.

It's not as if they didn't warn us , way back in March, that this would happen:And when Mitt had a wee little problem with the lady voters

And then there was the convention:



His biggest problem is that regular voters don’t like him as much as Obama. That's especially true of women, and that’s why the stakes are high for Ann Romney’s speech on the crucial opening night of the convention. [...] “Mitt Romney is a very private man on a public quest, and we still have a sense that we do not know him,” said Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, who advised Romney during his 2008 campaign. “The convention is the best opportunity for the Romney campaign to give you a window into his soul, and the best window into Mitt Romney the man is Ann Romney his wife.”

GOV. JAN BREWER (R-AZ): Well, there’s a lot of issues out there. But, you know, we’re here at the convention, and I believe that that is our great opportunity to unite Republicans behind Governor Romney, and then to be able to reintroduce Governor Romney to the American people, to the Republicans, and the Democrats, and the Independents. That’s our opportunity.

But in an attempt to woo those outside the convention center, Republicans used the first night of prime time television coverage of the convention to reintroduce Romney to a broader swath of the American public, casting him as champion of family values and an economic reformer.

Mitt Romney's campaign has concluded that the 2012 election will not be decided by elusive, much-targeted undecided voters — but by the motivated partisans of the Republican base. This shifting campaign calculus has produced a split in Romney's message.

But on a conference call with reporters, Romney adviser Ed Gillespie said flatly that there would not be any new policy ideas coming from Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. They’ll be focused, Gillespie said, on laying out the details of plans they’ve already announced.

Everyone had such high hopes And oh, how they tried But since that didn't work:But no, no, no, there's nothing new here Maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't that Americans haven't been sufficiently introduced to Mitt Romney and his "ideas." They get it. They know him and his family and his story and his business record and his "values" and his "positions."

Americans already know what he's all about. And that is his real problem.

