Doesn't Anybody in the Romney Campaign Know How to Play This Game?
That Romney cannot hire competent campaign managers is a very interesting piece of information indeed…
Zeke Miller:
How Mitt Romney Is Losing The Debate Expectations Game: Romney has devoted at least four days off the campaign trail since the GOP convention for official debate prep, campaign aides said, and has held ad hoc strategy and briefing sessions since shortly after becoming the nominee. "We're going to be ready — very ready to face the president and we're going to win," one top Romney aide told BuzzFeed. The Romney campaign has chosen simply to exude confidence about the upcoming contests…. "I just think we're being honest," a top Romney advisor, Stuart Stevens, told BuzzFeed….
Obama’s campaign… [has] privately and publically been projecting a low-grade panic that the Harvard Law-educated president could flub the coming debates. One told BuzzFeed last week that the president has the tendency to get "testy" when challenged, and that given his dislike for Romney, "who knows what can happen." "There were some bad debates last time around," warned another. They are, meanwhile, talking up Romney’s abilities….
Their stagy gloom has penetrated deeply into the political conversation, with public and private pronouncements that the president — windy at the best of times, cloistered by four years as the most powerful man in the world — could slip in this key forum. And in a particular stroke of expectations-setting success by Chicago,The New York Times reported that aides are concerned about Obama's tendency to "procrastinate."
If the trend continues, Romney may need to do handstands on stage to make in impression, while the president will win simply by keeping his shirt on.
