Mitt's closing act: will there be a curtain call?

A WEEK after dropping out of the Republican presidential race on February 7, Mitt Romney held a meeting with senior staff at his campaign headquarters in Boston. They had a lot of questions to consider. Should Romney endorse John McCain now, or wait awhile? Should he hold on to his delegates to make some sort of statement at the Republican convention? What should his public stance be?

"After he stepped aside, the plan was to use the governor's delegates to have a voice for conservatives at the convention," says one Romney aide who was at the meeting. "But then he asked, 'What's the best way to unite the party right now?'" As his aides sat around the conference table, Romney answered his own question: He should bite the bullet and endorse the man who had been his bitter rival just a few days ago. Romney asked campaign manager Beth Myers to get in touch with the McCain campaign to work out logistics. "We were thinking they would want to do it in Phoenix, or in Texas, and make a big deal about it," the aide recalls. Instead, Myers came back and said McCain wanted to do it now--right now.

And so it was. Romney made the decision at about 12:30 P.M. By 3:30 he was standing next to McCain, who, eager to show the party was uniting behind his candidacy, had hurried to Boston for the news conference. "I am honored today to give my full support to Senator McCain's candidacy for the presidency of the United States," Romney told reporters. "I'm officially endorsing his candidacy. And today I'm asking my delegates to vote for Senator McCain at the convention."

And that was that, a graceful end to the Romney campaign. Now, what is left for Romney is a detailed look at what went wrong (and right) in his two-year effort. The object is not only to better understand what he has been through; it is also to figure out what lessons might apply to the 2012 campaign if the political planets align in Romney's favor.

Much of the Romney post-mortem involves issues well known to the public. Was Romney done in by the fact that he was a New England governor in a party based in the South and West? Was it that he was a relative unknown? Was it the flip-flops? The Mormon factor? Those are all legitimate questions. But Romney and his advisers are also addressing a bigger, more fundamental issue: Did he really make the case that he should be president?

It was a question that caused considerable debate and controversy behind the scenes in the campaign. Romney began his candidacy by presenting himself as a super-competent CEO who could fix America's ills, especially its economic ills. When he announced his run in February 2007, he chose the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., as his location, standing in front of a new Ford Escape hybrid SUV, an American Motors Rambler from the early 1960s (made when Romney's father was head of the company), and, suspended from cables above, a vintage DC-3 airplane. Some observers initially had trouble deciphering the visual message Romney wanted to send, but the idea was to stress progress, the future, and good old American know-how.

"This place isn't just about automobiles," Romney told the crowd. "It's about innovation.... And if there ever was a time when innovation and transformation were needed in government, it's now." Through the rest of his speech, Romney hit that theme over and over; he used some form of the word "transform" 13 times. It was the speechified version of what the Romney team called the "transformational chain," a chart showing Romney's life as an innovator. "It was very simple," says Alex Castellanos, a strategist who began working with Romney in 2006. "He changed business, he changed the Olympics, he transformed Massachusetts. What was next? It wasn't hard to figure out."

A month after the campaign rollout, Castellanos produced a PowerPoint presentation--those seemed to be the rage inside Romney's data-driven world--focusing on the theme of "change." "The 'agent of change in Washington' positioning is now more open to us than ever," the presentation said. "Changing things like Washington is what Mitt Romney is best at. 'Change Washington' lets us bring out the best Mitt Romney."

The idea was to position Romney as visionary leader who could get things done. The vision element was crucial, because without it Romney would have seemed like another former Massachusetts governor who claimed to be all about competence. "Michael Dukakis said, 'Let's make what we have work better,'" Castellanos explains. "There was no vision of an America transformed, stronger, ready to meet a new generation of challenges."

Romney, according to the plan, would provide the vision to go along with his competence. But by last fall, the "change" theme ran into reality on the ground in Iowa. A campaign with a grand theme became a fight over the issue du jour when Mike Huckabee, the most gifted natural campaigner in the field, began to draw Romney away from his message.

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At the time Romney was fighting Huckabee, he also began to suffer from dissent within his ranks. To supplement Castellanos, he brought in another team of media advisers, Stuart Stevens and Russ Schriefer. They had worked Massachusetts Republican races with previous governors Bill Weld and Paul Cellucci, and had helped lots of other high-profile candidates nationwide. The two strategy teams were soon in conflict, disagreeing on all sorts of things.

It was a distraction for the campaign. "The debate among the consultants got to the point where the debate became about the debate," says one Romney insider who wasn't affiliated with either side. "The fight was over who was going to win the fight. Alot of it became pride of authorship rather than what was the best direction for the campaign." A second unaffiliated Romney adviser says, "We just sort of had paralysis when those guys came in."

For awhile, that meant Romney ran a somewhat static frontrunner campaign in Iowa, leaving the threat from Huckabee unanswered. And then, when the team did react, Romney the visionary leader became a bit less visible, and Romney the immigration hardliner, social conservative, and negative campaigner came closer to the spotlight.

Castellanos believes the campaign lost its way, at least a bit. But Stevens says the change wasn't really the result of a debate inside the campaign; it was a reaction to what voters were demanding. "They were interested in social issues, in the combination of issues that threatened the family structure, from crystal meth to Internet porn to gay marriage," he says. "Those issues weren't important [simply] because Mike Huckabee was talking about them. No, this was what that group of voters was interested in, and I think it would have been the height of arrogance to tell them, 'No, you shouldn't be interested in those issues,' just as it would have been the height of arrogance to go to Michigan and tell them, 'You shouldn't worry about the death of the heartland; you should worry about global warming.' I mean, voters determine the landscape of the campaign."

And the voters gave Romney a loss in Iowa. By the time he arrived in New Hampshire, the day after that defeat, he began to return to the themes he had hit at the Henry Ford Museum nearly a year earlier. We've got to change Washington, Romney told voters. It's broken, and I'm the man to fix it.

But the change--dictated in part by the ongoing debate inside the campaign and in part by the far different political conditions in Iowa and New Hampshire--made Romney more vulnerable to the charge that he will tell voters whatever he thinks they want to hear.

And so he lost, though he went out on a positive note. Most observers believe Romney is well positioned for 2012, should John McCain lose the general election. But before he can run again, Romney will have to answer--apart from all consultants and advisers--the most fundamental question of all: Why should he be president?