The qualities that helped Romney as an industry executive worked against him as a presidential candidate;[29] he had difficulty being articulate, often speaking at length and too forthrightly on a topic and then later correcting himself while maintaining he was not.[42][141][142] Reporter Jack Germond joked that he was going to add a single key on his typewriter that would print, "Romney later explained...."[141] Life magazine wrote that Romney "manages to turn self-expression into a positive ordeal" and that he was no different in private: "nobody can sound more like the public George Romney than the real George Romney let loose to ramble, inevitably away from the point and toward some distant moral precept."[42]
The perception grew that Romney was gaffe-prone and an oaf;[29][141] the campaign, beset by internal rivalries, soon went through the first of several reorganizations.[140] By then, Nixon had already overtaken Romney in Gallup's Republican preference poll, a lead he would hold throughout the rest of the campaign.[143][144] The techniques that had brought Romney victories in Michigan, such as operating outside established partisan formulas and keeping a distance from Republican Party organizational elements, proved ineffective in a party nominating contest.[145] Romney's national poll ratings continued to erode, and by May he had lost his edge over Johnson.[140] The Detroit riots of July 1967 did not change his standing among Republicans,[143] but did give him a bounce in national polls against the increasingly unpopular president.[140] A couple of months later, Romney staged a three-week, 17-city tour of the nation's ghettos, seeking to engage militants and others in dialogue.[131]
Questions were occasionally asked about Romney's eligibility to run for President due to his birth in Mexico, given the ambiguity in the United States Constitution over the phrase "natural-born citizen".[10][143] Romney's membership in the LDS church was scarcely mentioned at all during the campaign,[143][145][146][147] with what indirect attention there was focusing on the contrast between Romney's pro-civil rights stance and his church’s policy at the time of not allowing blacks to participate fully.[24] Some historians and Mormons suspected then and later that had Romney's campaign lasted longer and been more successful, his religion might have become a more prominent issue.[143][146][148] Romney's campaign did often focus on his core beliefs; a Romney billboard in New Hampshire read "The Way To Stop Crime Is To Stop Moral Decay".[129][140] Dartmouth College students gave a bemused reaction to his morals message, displaying signs such as "God Is Alive and Thinks He's George Romney".[131] A spate of books were published about Romney, more than for any other candidate, and included a friendly campaign biography, an attack from a former staffer, and a collection of Romney's speeches.[149]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Romney#1968_presidential_campaign
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