At this point, I think he figures it is a lost cause. It is the same thought process that McCain had. He knew he was losing, so he tried a "Hail Mary" pass with Palin. That looked good for a bout 48 hours until she started to open her mouth. Not long after that, he suspended his campaign when the Bush meltdown hit its peak. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that he thought this was the right and honorable thing to do in light of that crisis. But he also knew it was a lost cause by that point.
Same deal with Romney -- just a month earlier. He saw a small number of undecideds and didn't think he could make up that ground without a high-risk move. Instead of a safe candidate like Pawlenty or a candidate like Rubio that might help is a must-win state, he picked the highest risk running-mate he possibly could. I don't think that was smart on any level, but he evidently thought it was his best chance to Etch-a-Sketch the race. But it was only about 3 days before he realized that instead of shaking up the race, Ryan was a big net negative. Too bad they don't let you take back your VP choice.
Then the convention. It couldn't have been much worse. "His people" really screwed over Ron Paul. Big mistake there. And then the nation was treated to the angry, frothing, hysterical cast of speakers. What would it take to get a genuine smile from anybody at the RNC? I don't see how Romney could have missed the fact that almost every speaker was jockeying for position in 2016, and most wouldn't even have mentioned Romney's name at all if their speeches hadn't been vetted. And then there was Clint Eastwood.
Romney isn't completely stupid. He must have known the convention was a disaster. He didn't even bother to campaign the following week. If his people told him "Don't worry, the country is so divided now, neither party will get the traditional 'convention bounce'," by now he has figured out the RNC was a new loss and the DNC got a big bounce.
So why campaign? When you plane isn't broken, you are drawing 500 people at the same time Obama is drawing 10,000. Campaigning just reinforces that lopsided enthusiasm gap. So you hunker down and see if the remaining advertising money will do anything for you. And you wait for the last chance for a change: the debates.
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When he destroyed all those companies at Bain, how many times was Romney man enough to come face the employees eye to eye to deliver the news?
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