Noonan: ‘Mitt, This Isn’t Working’

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Conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who was critical of Mitt Romney’s handling of the attacks in Libya last week, argues in a Wall Street Journal post that Romney is running a bad campaign and needs to turn things around quickly in order to win. The post, which published Tuesday evening, is titled “Time for an Intervention.”

“It’s time to admit the Romney campaign is an incompetent one,” Noonan writes. “An intervention is in order. ‘Mitt, this isn’t working.'”

Noonan also takes aim at Romney for spending too much time fundraising and not enough time on the trail, which she calls “slightly crazy.”

Romney doesn’t seem to be out there campaigning enough. He seems—in this he is exactly like the president—to always be disappearing into fund-raisers, and not having enough big public events.

 

But the logic of Romney’s fundraising has seemed, for some time, slightly crazy. He’s raising money so he can pile it in at the end, with ads. But at the end will they make much difference? Obama is said to have used a lot of his money early on, to paint a portrait of Romney as Thurston Howell III, as David Brooks put it. That was a gamble on Obama’s part: spend it now, pull ahead in the battlegrounds, once we pull ahead more money will come in because money follows winners, not losers.

 

If I’m seeing things right, that strategy is paying off.

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