dana let me go to you. let mitt be mitt, how does that strike you? see, i don t buy this reverend, this whole idea of you know that his wife and his son swoop in and bring out the authentic. how do we note the mitt last wednesday was the real mitt, not the one we saw in the primaries, not the one tess convention not the one as governor of massachusetts. it s not clear to me letting mitt be mitt means anything that there is a real and authentic mitt. he changes his positions the way you and i change neckties. i think this is a way to dress i have a situation. he did this out of necessity very clearly he saw his campaign was going down the trajectory was headed in needed to try something new, and he got pretty lucky. he was able to do the etch a sketch at a point where the conservatives were desperate
change that the family is really in control. i suspect they re doing what they were doing all along, and they re looking for a way to explain in a real try to make it look real what is really just a crafted political calculations. the hard thing wasn t working. let s throw everything out the window and try to run him as something else. now they re trying to work backwards to put a narrative around that. in all respect to members of families like you ve been not only did romney change his approach, he changed his politics. i mean he changed policy. that s not family driven. for him to deny his tax cut and say his health plan was going to cover preexisting conditions this is a policy shift, a lot deeper than him being approachable and all of that. and if this is in fact coming from the family this is clearly the piece of it they don t
and get mitt the candidate campaign right. i did his campaign for governor. i m of the school of thought, let mitt be mitt. loosen him up, get out of the dockers into a suit. what do you mean, let mitt be mitt? quit some of the forced stuff. less teleprompter. no jeans? just put him in the suit and say i m the grown-up, i m the coach, i ve run the fast one. you want a therapist, you got one in the white house, he can t deliver anything. let him be the fixed kind of guy he is and don t worry about the gaffes and clunkiness. get out the day-to-day process. and mitt romney when he was governor of massachusetts did extremely well, he was elected by independents. your party, though, seems to have fallen into the what i call the new cycle trap. and obama s campaign, they arguably lost more new cycles than they won against mccain. in the last three months. i ve never been a fan of counting news cycles. the romney campaign does seem to want to chase the news cycles. the republica
that could meet the romney onslaught. let s talk about this romney issue. you re a a republican who is a hollywood guy so i feel like you have an appreciation for this. when you see the snl parody and this gelling and it may be only a gelling narrative about mitt romney, the person. right. how do you he s got to fix this to a point. how much? how does he do it? it s a problem, because you don t want that to get critical mass. a lot of the key to the campaign for republicans is not to have romney in a develop velcro suit. doesn t this poll show it? no. that number of who do you like. that s right there. if it s about romney the good news obama wins. right. those polls are feathers in the wind. there s time. but romney has to get laser-beam focus, to get the agenda back on the economic issues and widen those numbers in your poll. they re too close for romney. he needs a bigger lead.
i d tell him to do it every day. i was asked yesterday if he needed a moment. he needed one years ago and needs one today between now and the general election. he has to show voters every single day that, you know, when you open the windows and the sky s blue, he speaks the truth. people have the sense that romney reads what s handed to him. and i don t think that s the real romney. i think there s a nervousness about the way he presents himself because after you ve made a bunch of mistakes, you get overhandled, overmanaged. and with most politicians, there s the cry, let mitt be mitt. no one s going to say that because people don t know. i think if romney can, i don t know, tear back the curtains and show some strength and show that every day on the election trail that he s willing to call things as he sees them he can say it without huddling with advisers. when someone disparages a woman communicating her position on contraception, that he can speak the truth and say what he