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out and do more meetings and have more coffees and see more people. And what I concluded was that we were surrounded by a bunch of guys who had learned politics twenty-five years ago and they had no idea how much the world had changed.” He added, “By the way, all of them except [Rick] Tyler went to Perry, and I’ll let you decide how successful they’ve been.” He insisted that Perry had been talked into running by his former advisers, including David Carney, who had been Gingrich’s strategist before he signed on with Perry. “I think it’s 100 percent why Perry ran,” said Gingrich. “I think had I been as strong in June as I am today, Perry wouldn’t have run. He had no intention of running and didn’t want to run.”

Romney, said Gingrich, “has the Giuliani problem, which is he can’t find any place to win. Remember, Giuliani didn’t go to Iowa because he couldn’t win. He didn’t go to New Hampshire because he couldn’t win. He didn’t even go to South Carolina because he couldn’t win—which somehow magically is going to turn around in Florida? “I just spent two days in New Hampshire. I didn’t find any place where there’s enthusiasm for Mitt Romney. The only place that’s enthusiastic for Mitt Romney is the elite media, who keep saying he is inevitable.”

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The Romney team expected that eventually Republican voters would come around, after parking their votes here and there, and get behind Romney. Most Romneyites credited campaign manager Matt Rhoades for relentless “message discipline,” a quality the political pros worship the way nuns venerate chastity.

To be sure, the likability issue was nagging. Even Romney’s fellow investment bankers didn’t love him. In an interview with POLITICO, one of them described having dinner with Romney a couple of years ago, when Romney was looking for supporters. “I think he comes across as, first of all, very intelligent, very comfortable with himself, but when he asks you a question, it feels like he processes the answer—he takes the answer, finds the file folder in his brain about where he’s supposed to store it in case he needs it later, files it, and then moves on to the next thing. It’s like he’s in data collection mode, but not at a gut but an intellectual, almost robotic level,” said the banker. The banker marveled that Romney—a flip-flopper from the moderate Northeast—could have apparently snatched the nomination from true believers like Governor Perry, who was much more in step with the GOP zeitgeist.

Romney had by and large avoided slipups on the campaign trail, but in Ohio in late October, an old Romney bugaboo—flip-flopping—had resurfaced. Ohio voters were set to vote on a referendum on whether collective bargaining by public employees should be banned—a cause dear to conservatives, but controversial in an old pro-labor state. In remarks to reporters, Romney waffled back and forth on the measure. The press corps jumped on this reemergence of the Old Romney, as did the conservative blogs. “Two, three more of those between now and the end of the year and we’re done. We will lose,” said a Romney adviser. Some Romney aides worried that withering attacks from Obama and the various Democratic groups would eventually get under Romney’s skin. Yes, Romney was a much tougher, more disciplined candidate than he had been in 2008. But he was not a superman, and, at least where his family’s honor was concerned, he was susceptible to what friends called “Mittfrontations.” At the Las Vegas debate, he had allowed Perry to bait him a bit, to make him turn red-faced, over the home lawn care flap.

Already, the Obama warriors were moving into position. “When David Axelrod [Obama’s chief strategist] says ‘weird’ [referring to Romney], that equals Mormon, and he says it all the time, and he’s tried to get under his skin,” said an adviser. “If Romney shows he can’t take a hit, can’t take punches, they’re going to hit him where he doesn’t like to be hit, which is the Mormon stuff.”

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The Obama camp was preparing to cast Romney as a “cheater.” At the end of October, a White House insider, a well-connected