¿Sobreconfiados en Boston?

Charlie Cook (National Journal) está entre los que no entienden el bajo perfil que está adoptando Team Romney este verano:

This presidential election is starting to confound me. The fundamentals are pulling strongly in favor of Mitt Romney, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that President Obama’s campaign seems consistently a half step, sometimes a full step or two, ahead of the Romney effort. If this is going to be a close race, as polls suggest it will be, campaigns matter. Even if someone believes (as I do) that fundamental forces matter most—that issues like the state and direction of the economy and the economic well-being of voters and how they perceive the country to be doing are the most important thing—if a race is close enough, a campaign with the sharper plan and crisper execution can sometimes prevail. Just look at the 51-48 percent squeaker that President George W. Bush won over Sen. John Kerry.

(...) The strategic decision by the Romney campaign not to define him personally—not to inoculate him from inevitable attacks—seems a perverse one. Given his campaign’s ample financial resources, the decision not to run biographical or testimonial ads, in effect to do nothing to establish him as a three-dimensional person, has left him open to the inevitable attacks for his work at Bain Capital, on outsourcing, and on his investments. It’s all rather inexplicable. Aside from a single spot aired in the spring by the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future, not one personal positive ad has been aired on Romney’s behalf. The view that any day or dollar spent on talking about anything other than the economy is a waste has been taken to such an extreme that Romney has no positive definition other than that of being a rich, successful, and presumably smart businessman. People see and feel the reasons for firing Obama every day in the economic statistics and the struggle that so many Americans face daily. The Romney campaign seems focused on reinforcing a message that hardly needs reinforcing, while ignoring a clear and immediate danger to its own candidate’s electability.

(...) It would appear that a certain overconfidence has built up in the Romney camp, a smugness that would appear to come from beating an incredibly weak group of underfinanced, poorly organized rivals. In a couple of cases, these included candidates whose campaigns couldn’t even manage to get their names on the ballot in the state in which they were legal residents (Virginia). Maybe it won’t matter, maybe the economy is so lousy and unlikely to improve that voters will opt to fire Obama after all. But this election is starting to look enough like 2004 that Karl Rove should be demanding royalties from the Obama campaign, and others may conclude that no presidential campaign should ever again be based in Boston.