The end of the road for Romney
Posted: Thursday, February 14, 2008 11:08 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
2008, Romney
Note: Erin McPike covered Mitt Romney for NBC News and National Journal, and below are some of her observations after covering his campaign. First Read ran a similar dispatch from our Edwards embed, Tricia Miller, after he pulled out of the race.
From NBC/NJ's Erin McPike
When Mitt Romney and his wife, Ann, went to his campaign headquarters in Boston for meetings the day after Super Tuesday, he drove the two of them –- alone. For a couple that’s spent the bulk of their time during the last year riding in motorcades and boarding chartered planes, it was a telltale sign that the whirlwind run was coming to an end.
Romney flew down to Washington on February 7 on a routine morning US Airways flight at 8:00 am with his wife, strategists Cindy Gillespie and Ron Kaufman, several other staffers and -- as luck would have it -- the AP reporter, NBC producer, and NBC/National Journal embed (yours truly) assigned to cover him.
Seated in the 12th row of the aircraft, one row behind me, Romney worked on something quietly and stopped only a few times -- one of which was to ask Ann and those around him how to spell “propitious.” Though he knew he would be calling off his presidential bid in a few hours at the conservative confab, CPAC, he appeared to be in good spirits.
Just one day earlier, the Romney campaign spent the day making the case that it would go forward. That seemed like a fantasy and a heady approach for a businessman who built part of his message around his background as a data-driven number-cruncher, because more and more analyses of the GOP primary started showing it would be next to impossible for Romney to catch McCain in the delegate hunt.
On the day of those meetings and decisions, the campaign operated as normal, but several reporters did ask around in the hopes of trying to lock down a schedule. And the press releases became increasingly scarce. Don’t forget, for months Team Romney overloaded inboxes and several times last year won the race for circulating the most emails during debates. Thursday morning before the concession, there was next to nothing. But because the campaign had spent so much time reassuring the press of the ongoing nature of the campaign, there was still some shock when he withdrew.
Just moments before he started speaking, a report appeared on Time’s The Page, and then two Washington Post reporters started typing e-mails and making phone calls furiously inside the auditorium in the Omni, where service was very slow, before heading out of room where the speech was about to begin as word began to spread.
That wasn’t the only time the campaign seemed like it was coming to a halt. After learning of his defeat in Florida, a top reporter assigned to the campaign turned to a handful of others in the press corps and said, “Poor Romney.” It was just about clear. Indeed, on the day after the Florida loss, Romney jetted right out of the Sunshine State in favor of the Golden State, where he would spend a few days before starting the trek East to land in Massachusetts to cast his vote on February 5. But on the long ride out there, the furiously busy press corps had little else to do but sleep. Several hours after arrival in Burbank, and there were still no e-mails from the campaign, and the press corps pretty much decided it was gloom and doom for Romney.
Perhaps sensing the race slipping away from him and the win in McCain’s grasp, Romney seemed to realize the need for his own good comeback headlines from the national press. So he started coming back to the press pen on the plane at least once a day and chatting up reporters, some of whom he had nicknamed privately months before. He never really veered off topic, however, and it just may have been too little, too late.
Although the press shop worked hard to keep the candidate on message, one of the key things that dogged Romney throughout his race were charges of flip-flopping from his past. What fit almost hand-in-hand with that is Romney’s nomadic history. Despite locating his campaign headquarters in Boston, residing in nearby Belmont and returning there following his withdrawal from the race, Romney sustained plenty of accusations that he abandoned Massachusetts –- the state that elected him governor. He launched his campaign in Michigan, where he grew up, but then he ended it in Washington, the very city he decried as broken and begged voters to allow him to fix.
But Washington was also where those in the conservative movement started talking about a future Romney bid -- perhaps four years from now.
