Mitt Romney has an Awful day in New Hampshire

For Mitt Romney, it was the event from hell. Or from heck, since Mitt Romney does not use words like hell.

Or any of the other bad words that any other candidate might have used after this event on the day following his narrow victory in the Iowa caucuses.

Let’s start with the mic check, that part of an event when a staffer comes out, pings his finger against the microphone and says, “Testing. Testing. One, two, three.”

Except the Romney mic check is a little … elaborate. Far more elaborate than any mic check I have ever heard.

A voice booms out over the loudspeakers in the gym at Manchester Central High. “Checking the press riser. Please let us know if you are getting any hums or buzzes. Clean? Is it crispy good?”

If the audience is puzzled by this — crispy good? Is this KFC? — they must have been downright baffled when a Romney staffer takes the stage and says, “White balance. Get your white balance.”

White balance is something video cameras need, but some in the crowd look around to see if someone is doing a racial headcount. Which would have been easy. Out of an audience of a few hundred, I count four black people, three of whom — magically! — are in the camera shot. (New Hampshire is only 1.1 percent black.)

These detailed checks tell me something: They tell me Mitt Romney likes his campaign to run well. Very well. Extremely well. As in flawlessly well.

And on the flight from Des Moines, everything had gone well. Reporters had their names on pieces of paper on each seat (reporters hate confusion), Romney came to the back of the plane wearing one of his windowpane shirts (he has several) and a pair of faded jeans (he switches between Tommy Bahama and The Gap, though some reporters feel The Gap is more flattering to him) and “banters,” saying things like, “You guys got nothing better to do?”

So everything is fine. Everything is dandy. The candidate looks confident and happy. And then he has to ruin things by actually campaigning.

At the high school gym, the campaign plays a medley of oldies — “Eye of the Tiger,” “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet,” “(Your Love Keeps Lifting Me) Higher” — and then the sound cuts out entirely as Ann Romney and political dignitaries enter not to uplifting music but to dead silence.

So, OK, stuff happens. There are some introductory remarks for which the sound is “crispy good,” and then Romney and John McCain walk out. McCain had endorsed Romney the night before, the value of which is problematical, but what the heck, he was the last Republican nominee (to lose).

Then Romney announces this is going to be a two-person town hall and that McCain is going to stay on the stage and take questions, too.

This is odd enough — the crowd has probably come to see and hear Romney — but doubly odd since McCain hates public speaking and is no good at it, which he immediately proceeds to demonstrate....

Continued at:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0112/71096.html