FLORIDA | Förlusten i South Carolina fick Mitt Romneys kampanjrådgivare att tänka till. Nu har man lagt om strategin för att kunna vinna Florida.
Resultatet blev en mer offensiv Romney. Han lyckades t.o.m. vrida valdebatterna ur händerna på huvudmotståndaren Newt Gingrich.
Jim Rutenberg och Jeff Zeleny i The New York Times:
[T]he Romney team outlined the new approach to the candidate. Put aside the more acute focus on President Obama and narrow in on Mr. Gingrich.
Find lines of attack that could goad Mr. Gingrich into angry responses and rally mainstream Republicans. Swarm Gingrich campaign events to rattle him. Have Mr. Romney drop his above-the-fray persona and carry the fight directly to his opponent, especially in two critical debates scheduled for the week.
[…]
If Mr. Romney does win here on Tuesday, it will have been through a blistering and unrelenting series of attacks. His campaign has pressed everything at its disposal into service to eviscerate Mr. Gingrich, painting him as an erratic, unreliable Washington insider in mailings and television advertisements, at two critical debates here (where his team made sure Mr. Romney had ample and vocal supporters in the audiences) and even by sending supporters to mock him at his own events.
On Saturday, it released a new ad featuring a 1997 NBC News segment in which the anchor Tom Brokaw reported that Congressional peers of Mr. Gingrich, then speaker of the House, had “found him guilty of ethics violations.”
David Kochel, an adviser who arrived here from Iowa to oversee the pressure campaign, described the strategy as “let’s go rush the quarterback.” A team of Romney boosters started infiltrating nearly every Gingrich campaign stop to offer instant rebuttals. Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah showed up to challenge Mr. Gingrich’s record to reporters and at one point tangled with Mr. Gingrich’s press secretary as the cameras rolled. Bay Buchanan, a longtime conservative activist, worked on the Romney campaign’s behalf to win over voters and commentators.
Rich Galen, The Daily Beast, skriver:
In the debate Thursday night, Gingrich complained that “it’s increasingly interesting to watch the Romney attack machine coordinate things,” after a full day of an array of attacks on Gingrich along an astonishingly broad front—from Elliott Abrams, to R. Emmett Tyrrell, to Bob Dole—all made easy to find because they were accumulated and posted by Matt Drudge.
It was political shock and awe.
Were the attacks unfair? That depends upon who one is backing in the race. Were they, as Gingrich suggested, coordinated? Clearly. Was it the kind of day that only a campaign with a fully developed plan and the capacity to execute it could have pulled off? Absolutely. Could Gingrich have done it even if he had thought of it? Not on your life.
Gingrich’s complaint was actually a compliment. The Romney campaign appears to be a well-trained army, which has plenty of ammunition and the discipline to use those bullets when they will have the most effect. Like on the day of a hugely important debate.
[…]
Gingrich is a student of military history, tactics, and strategy. He knows, or should know, that the same person cannot design the strategy for a war, do the logistics, sell to civilians why this is crucial to their future, train the troops, and lead the charge up the hill.
It takes a trained army to run a war. It takes a trained staff to run a major campaign.
Se även: Judith Greys “Republican Political Ads in Florida: Why Romney’s Are Best” på The Daily Beast.
the Campaign Dossier 