Mitt Romney made his fortune and his reputation with clear-eyed analyses of the opportunities and threats of his ventures, and of his own strengths and weaknesses.
But his presidential bid faltered on some fundamental miscalculations. He believed he could remake himself as a social conservative and still convince voters he was genuine. And his campaign did not foresee that another conservative, one with lustrous Christian credentials, would emerge as a strong challenger.
Yesterday, as they surveyed the wreckage of his campaign, even his most ardent supporters conceded that Romney had not played to his strengths as a turnaround artist, management expert, and fiscally conservative governor.
"If I had to do one thing over again, it would've been to position the governor consistently as the economic conservative in the field," Romney's Iowa chairman, Doug Gross, said yesterday. "There's a substantial portion of the Republican electorate who cares about those issues, and to occupy that space early would have been our niche."
But rather than downplay social issues and pivot to his impressive résumé, his campaign became fixated on presenting him as the champion of his party's right wing, emphasizing matters such as family values and illegal immigration.
In the end, the initial rationale for Romney's candidacy - that the country, and the wounded GOP, needed a fix-it man from outside Washington - was buried by an avalanche of questions about his authenticity. Every shading of the truth - his claims to have seen his father march with Martin Luther King Jr., that he was a lifelong hunter - magnified the perception that he was a flip-flopper on larger issues such as abortion and gay rights, willing to say or do anything to please the party's conservative wing.
"I think they went too far, I really do, and I think that really created some of the authenticity questions that cast a cloud over his whole campaign," said a source familiar with the campaign's strategy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was discussing private deliberations.
"My general impression was it was kind of a campaign without direction or soul," said another source close to the campaign.
The fateful decision to try to market himself as the social conservative in the race was further complicated when a personable former Baptist preacher came out of nowhere to challenge him. In a December 2006 strategy memo, his advisers predicted that former House speaker Newt Gingrich would be Romney's conservative rival.
But it turned out to be Mike Huckabee, who energized evangelicals in Iowa by playing up his Christian faith and not so subtly questioning Romney's Mormon faith. And when Huckabee won in Iowa, it ruined Romney's painstakingly prepared and costly strategy to generate momentum by winning the early states.
Huckabee remained a thorn in Romney's side through Super Tuesday, when the former Arkansas governor won five states and helped put Romney so far behind John McCain in the delegate count that it would be nearly impossible to catch up.
Mark DeMoss, an Atlanta public relations executive and evangelical who helped lead Romney's outreach to evangelical voters, said that if Romney were not Mormon, he would be president.
"I think he would be president," DeMoss said. "I believe that. I think a lot of people who were closed-minded on the subject wound up being open-minded, and we moved the needle somewhat on that. Unfortunately, there are still people who say the most important thing is the guy's faith or that his faith be the same as mine."
When he began considering a presidential run early in his tenure as governor, which started in 2003, Romney's strategists believed that he would have to run as an opponent of abortion in order to have even a shot of winning the Republican nomination. But to become governor, he had had to promise to preserve abortion rights.
In 2005, he came out against embryonic stem cell cloning, then emergency contraception, and finally he proclaimed his opposition to abortion. His team says the shift was genuine and, as Romney has always maintained, a result of his grappling with the issues as real policy and not theory. But it fueled criticism that he was rebranding himself like just another product.
"He had a concern over flip-flopping, that that would be a big criticism," said the source familiar with the campaign strategy. "Everybody knew it was something that would have to be overcome. But it wasn't really a choice if he was going to run for the Republican nomination."
Romney used his perch as chairman of the Republican Governors Association in 2006 to raise his national profile and develop relationships with party officials and donors across the country. He stunned fellow governors with his fund-raising ability, delivering $28 million to GOP candidates that year - $10 million more than any previous chairman.
Nationally, he was still unknown, but those relationships put Romney in the perfect position to raise a whopping $6 million in a single day early in his candidacy last year. His rainmaking helped him bat away the perception that he would be a self-funded millionaire candidate, and showed he had real support among the party faithful.
His money helped fund thousands of TV ads that pushed him to the top of the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire by the spring. The strategy at the time was to win the Iowa straw poll last August and emerge as the credible alternative to McCain.
Romney won the straw poll, but the McCain campaign had collapsed and did not compete, leaving Romney as the front-runner and Huckabee as his main competition in Iowa.
Romney's Mormonism had always concerned his advisers, who understood that evangelical Christians in Iowa and South Carolina considered his faith heretical. Romney tried to ease their fears by pointing to his large, loving family and his 38-year marriage, and he assiduously courted important evangelical activists, including Bob Jones III and James Dobson, who reportedly will endorse Huckabee. In December, to reassure Christian conservatives, he finally acquiesced to months of demands that he explain the role of his faith and gave a speech in which he declared that Jesus was his savior and that "freedom requires religion."
But Huckabee, whose wise-cracking, bass-guitar-playing appeal helped charm voters, implicitly highlighted a religious divide between his own Christianity and Romney's Mormonism. Huckabee ran a TV ad in Iowa declaring himself a "Christian leader," and one on Christmas that appeared to show a floating cross over his shoulder. Even though Romney's team turned out as many supporters as they hoped to in the Iowa caucuses in January, Huckabee won because 60 percent of the caucus-goers were evangelicals, Gross said.
"He clearly used the religion card here," Gross said.
In sharp contrast to McCain and Huckabee, whose irreverence and humor endeared them to voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney came across on the stump as personable but a bit stiff. Ann Romney once said her husband's humor never came across during debates because he was always under attack.
Romney also ran tough ads attacking the records of McCain and Huckabee, fueling their animosity for him. McCain once likened Romney to a pig, and Huckabee compared him to an imperious boss.
As the campaign moved from state to state, Romney tailored his message to each electorate. In Iowa, he ran as a conservative ideologue. In New Hampshire, he ran as the Washington outsider and antitax warrior. In Michigan, he was an economic repairman who would "fight for every job." He carried that message into South Carolina and Florida, but after losing those states, he presented himself once again as the champion of the right wing. Crisscrossing the country last week, he pledged to defend "the heart and soul of the Republican Party."
"If there's anything his candidacy proves, it's that even with a lot of money and a really well spoken, articulate guy, you can't have it both ways. You've either got to pick a policy direction and a coalition of voters and go for them or not," said Representative Dana Rohrabacher of California, who endorsed Romney last month.
The result: After spending more than $87 million last year and putting in $35 million of his own money, Romney ended up with nearly 300 delegates, some 400 fewer than McCain after Tuesday's 21 contests.
Wednesday, Romney huddled with key advisers in his North End headquarters, even as his campaign spokesman insisted he would press on. As Romney sat down to write his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, his thinking came into focus and he made the painful decision to drop out, DeMoss said.
Yesterday, at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, the gathered conservative activists chanted, "Mitt, Mitt," when he took the stage, and shouted, "No, no," when he announced he was suspending his campaign. After he spoke, as the applause washed over him and his wife, they were visibly moved.
Afterward his supporters hugged him and offered him words of support.
"He was just grateful for the people that were with him and supported him early," DeMoss said. "I just told him I was so proud of him, and I would do it again. I'll be his friend forever."
