Romney Lost Race in Summer After Obama Redefined Resume

By Lisa Lerer - Nov 7, 2012, Bloomberg

Mitt Romney lost the presidential race in the summer.

It was the third week of July and the Republican presidential candidate was flying across the Atlantic for an international tour designed to make him look like a commander- in-chief. The 2012 Summer Olympics in London were about to start, a global sporting event that campaign aides concluded would minimize media focus on the presidential campaign.

Back home, Democrats made a different calculation. That week, they aired a blizzard of ads undercutting the narrative of Romney’s campaign by turning his strongest credential -- his business record -- into a liability. While Romney traveled abroad, $1.2 million worth of attack ads played 1,947 times on Ohio stations alone, charging him with shipping companies to China, jobs to India, and his personal wealth to tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

“Mitt Romney’s not the solution. He’s the problem,” a narrator said in one of the spots.

Romney’s foreign trip was just one week in his six-year quest to capture the White House. Yet the episode highlighted a decisive difference in the race: While President Barack Obama’s campaign adopted an aggressive, negative strategy aimed at exploiting his rival’s weaknesses, the Romney team struggled to balance the business of running -- raising money and preparing for debates -- with the daily grind of politics. That caused them to miss opportunities to create early momentum and allowed the Democrats to define his message.

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