But the last few days of the campaign found the Republican frontrunner on the defensive over the job-cutting side of Bain Capital -- and committing unforced errors with an ill-timed, if innocently intended, comment about liking to fire people, a ham-handed attempt to strike a common chord, and an agitated exchange with a protester. On Monday, the tightly controlled campaign canceled several TV interviews to stanch the bleeding from the self-inflicted wounds.
All in all, it was a problematic performance for a putatively polished candidate, an unwelcome reminder to Republican voters that even after years of campaigning, in the heat of battle, Romney can still be a stumble-prone candidate. To put it another way, the Mitt you see when politics is easy isn’t necessarily the Mitt you get when the pressure’s on.
Romney’s firing comment itself wasn’t related to his days at Bain Capital, but rather to the salubrious benefits that competition and choice bring to health-care consumers.
“I like being able to fire people who provide services to me,” he said during a speech to the Greater Nashua Chamber of Commerce. “If someone doesn’t give me the good service I need … I’m going to go get somebody else to provide that service to me.”
But talk of a clueless contender leaning forward into a left-right combination! Both his Democratic critics and his Republican rivals quickly pounced -- as he should have known they would.
That stumble came atop Romney’s Sunday comment that “I know what’s it’s like to worry whether you’re gonna get fired.”
Meant as an expression of economic empathy, it demonstrated exactly the opposite: Just how hard it is for the gently born Romney, who after an elite education quickly landed on capitalism’s escalator, to strike a common chord.
Then, in his last appearance on Monday, the frontrunner seemed rattled when Occupy protesters interrupted the Patriotic Parsing of Sentimental Songs that substitutes for a substantive stump speech.
