It's obviously too early to get too excited by a complete Romney meltdown, but Politico has an interesting story about how all of Mitt's insider's blame one guy for the current and ongoing Republican disaster--and that one guy isn't Mitt himself, it's campaign manager, Stuart Stevens.
Clearly everyone in Camp Romney has their knives out for this guy, because the loathing is coming in from all directions.
Long story short, Team Romney had a product to launch at the RNC and utterly, utterly failed.
Read the entire piece, but one interesting tidbit jumped out--the writing of Romney's acceptance speech which notably failed to mention either the troops in Afghanistan or anything resembling a plan going forward. This was due to some Keystone Cops of a scramble even getting the speech written at all. It had been assigned to multiple people through the preceding 8 days prior to the convention and was, for reasons unknown, trashed repeatedly by Stevens.
Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s top strategist, knew his candidate’s convention speech needed a memorable mix of loft and grace if he was going to bound out of Tampa with an authentic chance to win the presidency. So Stevens, bypassing the speechwriting staff at the campaign’s Boston headquarters, assigned the sensitive task of drafting it to Peter Wehner, a veteran of the last three Republican White Houses and one of the party’s smarter wordsmiths.
Not a word Wehner wrote was ever spoken.
Stevens junked the entire thing, setting off a chaotic, eight-day scramble that would produce an hour of prime-time problems for Romney, including Clint Eastwood’s meandering monologue to an empty chair.
On a hopeful note, the article vows that the campaign has a good solid plan to finally introduce Mitt Romney to the voting masses. On an even more hopeful note, the article makes clear that no one will be losing their job over the over-stuffed clown car of a convention and campaign that has thus far been produced so that objective I just mentioned will likely be pulled off with the same grace and panache that we've witness thus far.
Happy reading!