1) He's Hiding: Romney views the press with asperity, engaging with reporters much less often than Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich. That was a viable strategy back when his winning the nomination seemed a lock, but Romney's ahead by an inch, not a mile, and he's getting punished for pretending otherwise. Denied access or real news, reporters will write about optics and gaffes -- and do so with relish.

2) He's Trying to Run Out the Clock: Romney's stump speech is a collection of platitudes and the strange ritual recitation of the lyrics to "America the Beautiful." As one of his fundraisers put it to John Heilemann of New York magazine, "I have never seen anything more ridiculous or belittling." This creates the impression that Romney has nothing to say -- or, worse, has chosen not to say anything substantive-- and is trying to coast to the nomination. Reporters feel duty-bound to push back.

3) He'll Say Anything: Romney has a reputation as someone who will say anything to get ahead. Lately, he's been struggling, and now -- presto! -- he's rolled out a new tax cut. Romney isn't granted the benefit of the doubt, so the assumption is that this is a political ploy, not a bold policy choice.

4) He Wants to Have it Both Ways: Romney's advisers fault the media for focusing on trivialities like the empty stadium rather than the size of his proposed cut. A big reason why his tax cut wasn't treated more seriously is that he won't say how he'll pay for it -- he wants to take credit for the tax cut, but avoid the responsibility to pay for it.

5) He's Awkward: It's hard to recall a likely major-party nominee who was less of a natural politician than Romney. The constant references to his wealth -- the $10,000 bet with Rick Perry, the Cadillacs, his quip yesterday about not being an "ardent" NASCAR fan but being friends with several team owners -- have become a bizarre-but-captivating spectacle, what James Fallows has aptly dubbed "Romney's gaffe-Tourette's."

6) He's Underperforming: Turnout and enthusiasm in GOP primaries and caucuses are both way down this year. That's certainly not Romney's fault alone. But his candidacy in particular is based on the idea that he's an electable alternative to Barack Obama -- and yet his own party has obvious qualms about him.

7) He's Forfeited His Right to Complain: Last November, the Romney campaign rolled out its first ad, an attack on President Obama built around a quote taken entirely out of context. In the ad, Obama is heard to say, "if we keep talking about the economy, we're going to lose." But Obama was quoting a Republican, John McCain. Oddly, the Romney campaign bragged about having done this "intentionally." This cost them a large measure of credibility with the press, which became much less receptive to the campaign's subsequent complaints.

8) He's a Mystery: Romney has been running for president for six years. He's highly accomplished in business and government. He has money, good looks, a beautiful family -- and yet most political insiders feel they don't understand what makes him tick. That doesn't appear likely to change, because Romney is so guarded and press averse, and yet at the same time apparently incapable on his own of making a strong case for his candidacy. Still, Romney supporters can take solace in this fact: practically nobody believes that he won't wind up as the nominee.

Calmes's piece makes clear that the White House never considered embracing Bowles-Simpson:

For all of its subsequent import, Mr. Obama's initial response to Bowles-Simpson was little debated at the White House, aides say. Not one adviser supported embracing it.

But what's notable about Calmes's story is that even though the administration failed to win a deal through its preferred course of low-key negotiations, White House officials appear utterly convinced that their strategy was the correct one. Calmes has Obama himself explaining to Erskine Bowles, the commission co-chair, that if he had "put his arms around" the plan immediately, it "would have been savaged by Republicans, and that would have killed it."

Really? Republicans certainly would have attacked the president, but it's not clear to me that this would have killed the plan. In fact, the very public fight over the payroll tax cut textension last December -- a fight the White House won -- offers an intriguing counter-example of what might have happened had Obama publicly embraced Bowles-Simpson.

The key factor in the payroll fight was that it wasn't simply a battle between Democrats and Republicans. Many Senate Republicans supported the extension, so when the White House took the fight public, it did so with bipartisan support, which isolated House Republicans. It helped, of course, that the battle was over tax cuts, which most voters perceive as desirable. But in the end, House Republicans' obstruction and obstinance wasn't sustainable.

What would have happened had Obama embraced Bowles-Simpson? We know that he'd have had some serious Republican supporters on his side, such as Sen. Tom Coburn, a commission member who voted for the plan. He'd probably also have had public support -- cutting the deficit isn't quite as popular as tax cuts, but it's something most voters would like to see happen. And as in the payroll fight, his public embrace would have isolated House Republicans. White House officials are adamant that Republican attacks would have scotched any deal. And perhaps they would have, although the payroll fight suggests that's no sure thing. But having struck out in private talks, it's hard to see how the president would be worse off today had he chosen this course. He'd at least have gotten credit for trying.

UPDATE: Good Ezra Klein post making the often-missed point that rejecting Bowles-Simpson was a strategic, rather than an ideological, decision.

Despite the fact that Obama hasn't made the slightest feint toward regulating guns, firearms enthusiasts have whipped themselves into a paranoid frenzy, convinced that this is all just part of some elaborate conspiracy. Don't believe me? Here's how Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, put it to the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) two weeks ago:

Lip service to gun owners is just part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term. We see the president's strategy crystal clear: Get re-elected and, with no more elections to worry about, get busy dismantling and destroying our firearms' freedom, erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights and excise it from the U.S. Constitution...When the sun goes down on election day Barack Obama will have America's gun owners to thank for his defeat.

Note the twist: It's no longer Obama's election that poses a mortal danger to the liberty of Americans who want to assemble arsenals -- it's Obama's re-election. I'm no financial analyst, but you'd have to imagine that that line of reasoning isn't going to do anything to depress gun sales.

One thing I hadn't appreciated when I wrote my original piece was the breadth of the trend -- it's not just gun sales, but ammunition, and all those new firearms have brought the government a lot of revenue in the form of federal excise taxes. The website Ammo.net (what, you don't have it bookmarked?) has an eye-popping graphic on just why Obama is, as they put it, the "greatest gun salesman in America":

Via: Ammo.net

All the attention on Super PACs has overshadowed another, no less important story about how presidential campaigns are being funded: the post-Watergate campaign-finance program is on its death bed. This year, only one major-party presidential candidate, Republican Buddy Roemer, has agreed to limit his spending during the primary season in exchange for federal matching funds. As recently as 1996, every major-party candidate took federal funding, including Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

Even after George W. Bush in 2000 became the first nominee to shun federal funding, other candidates continued to rely on it in the primaries -- including, in 2008, the eventual vice-presidential nominee, Joe Biden, and five others. Under the federal financing system, the government this year will match up to $250 from an individual donation, with the maximum total amount set at $22.8 million, a number that rises every four years with inflation.

But that system has become a detriment, rather than a boon, to most presidential candidates. "Taking matching funds has really been seen as the scarlet letter,'' said former Federal Election Commission Chairman Michael Toner, now co-chairman of the election law and government ethics practice at Wiley Rein LLP. "It says you're not viable and you're not going to be nominated by your party.''

Roemer's national campaign manager, Carlos Sierra, countered with a more positive spin. "If more candidates went the matching funds route, that would mean fewer Wall Street and K Street fundraisers, and less favors candidates would have to promise to their big donors," he said.

As a candidate in 2008, Barack Obama became the first major-party nominee since Watergate to opt out of federal funding in the general election. His opponent, John McCain, did not, thereby agreeing to forego private funds (except for some legal and accounting costs) and limiting his campaign to the $84.1 million the government provided. McCain was significantly outspent, and Toner said he believes he'll be the last nominee to accept federal funding.

"Absent a major legislative overhaul, no serious candidate is going to take public funds for either the primary or general election,'' Toner said.

Twice last year, House Republicans voted to pull the plug on the campaign finance system, though advocates argue that a better solution is to provide more federal dollars.

"Our current system is broken,"  said Craig Holman of Public Citizen. "It does not justify getting rid of the public financing program; it calls for fixing the public financing system."

But it's embarrassing to President Obama, not least because he personally touted Solyndra as a beacon of "American ingenuity and dynamism" at a 2010 campaign stop, and a few of his big donors had financial stakes in the company. And so Republican investigators have pursued it with a vengeance, hoping to turn up the proverbial smoking gun that confirms their darkest suspicions -- so far, with no luck.

A White House source passed along some information that gives a sense of just how much time, money, and effort has been spent pursuing this investigation: House Republicans have sent 32 congressional letters, compelled 187,000 pages of administration documents, 72,000 pages of documents from Solyndra investors, 9 committee staff briefings, 5 committee hearings, and a sworn committee interview with the Obama bundler who raised money from people involved in the company. Much (but not all) of the committee's $7 million budget has been devoted to funding this inquisition. And it's turned up no evidence of wrongdoing.

One reason the investigation persists is that it's a handy pretext for demanding documents, and who knows what could turn up? But Democrats have also done a pretty lousy job of defending against the idea that something nefarious was going on. The clearest evidence that Solyndra was a worthy recipient of a government loan is that it also attracted hundreds of millions of dollars from big-name private investors and top venture capital firms, including Richard Branson, KKR, and Argonaut Private Equity (the full list is included in this bankruptcy filing [pdf]). In 2010, the Wall Street Journal named Solyndra the top venture-backed clean-tech company. MIT Technology Review named it one of the world's 50 most innovative companies. Goldman Sachs was the lead investment banker. So the notion that Solyndra was a boondoggle for Obama cronies is silly.

What's more, it was one of 28 companies that received loan guarantees under an Energy Department program, and the possibility that some of those companies might fail was anticipated by the program's authors: they budgeted $2.5 billion to cover any failures.

The real problem Solyndra illustrates is that the political world has a much harder time accepting failure than the business world. In light of this reality, the question that ought to be examined is whether it makes sense for the government to subsidize private businesses. The mess Solyndra has left behind -- many startups are now wary of accepting government support, even if they could use it -- has been costly to everyone involved, not least the taxpayers. In business, you cut your losses and move on. But in Congress, there's no penalty for throwing good money after bad.

Ryan and his colleagues are correct on all counts. But Obama's budget is noteworthy nonetheless, not because it has any hope of getting through Congress this spring but because it shows that he has finally learned an important lesson about governing in the modern age, especially when faced with a truculent opposition.

During Obama's first three years in the White House, the abiding liberal complaint against him was that he was a rube, who routinely made unnecessary concessions by proposing some reasonable compromise and then bargaining away the farm as savvy Republicans held fast to their partisan ideal. That was the pattern last April, when Republicans threatened to shut down the government. It repeated itself over the summer when Obama attempted to negotiate a "grand bargain'' to cut the deficit. And it happened again in August during the debt-ceiling fight.

Obama appears to have taken all this to heart. His budget indicates that he now understands that a "reasonable compromise'' is an end point, rather than a starting point, for negotiations and that partisanship sometimes has its uses.

How can a budget with no hope of passing be construed as useful? Because Congress has become so dysfunctional that the budget process no longer functions as intended. In years past, a president's plan would be introduced, debated, and some version of it passed, setting the parameters for what Congress could spend (actual outlays are done separately, through appropriations bills). But congressional partisanship has become so intense that both parties are increasingly loath to vote on budget resolutions that would expose them to attack. Democrats haven't introduced one in three years.

Republicans under George W. Bush skipped a few years, too. The danger in going forward was illustrated last year, when House Republicans passed Paul Ryan's budget and were immediately assailed for its Draconian cuts to Medicare and other programs. Ryan's plan didn't go anywhere. But many of the Republicans who voted for it will have a tougher time getting reelected this fall.

In lieu of the formal budget process, Congress has cobbled together a series of "continuing resolutions'' like the one that nearly shut down the government in April. To avoid the August shutdown and debt default, the parties struck another deal that carries through this year.

The real battle about how to resolve the great issues of taxing and spending probably won't be fought in the budget process at all, but in a separate, high-stakes negotiation this December. By then, the Bush tax cuts will be on the verge of expiring; the $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts to military and entitlement programs, agreed to as part of the debt-ceiling deal but dreaded by everyone, will be about to take effect; and the debt ceiling will need to be raised once more. Dysfunctional or not, the parties will have to strike a deal.

That's why Obama's budget really does matter: it's an opening bid in these negotiations. And its partisan character ought to quiet his liberal critics - it doesn't look as if he's about to concede anything prematurely.

When criticized for not having bargained harder in the past, Obama has replied that as the person ultimately responsible for the country's well-being, he cannot risk something like a national default. He didn't have the leverage to force the issue.

This time he will. If no deal is struck, taxes will rise substantially, the Pentagon's budget will be slashed, and Medicare and Medicaid will continue to grow unabated. As their response to his budget has made clear, that's an outcome that Republicans simply won't stand for.

Joshua Green writes a weekly column for the Boston Globe. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaGreen.

But in the meantime, a steady accretion of events and news stories has continued to tarnish the image of private equity investors as members of an undeserving, privileged class or -- worse -- possible criminals.

On Monday, Joe Dear, the chief investment officer for the California Public Employees Retirement System, one of the largest private equity investors, said the favorable tax treatment given to private equity managers is "indefensible." On Tuesday, Democratic Rep. Sander Levin of Michigan introduced the Carried Interest Fairness Act of 2012, which seeks to rectify that tax treatment, although the likelihood that the Republican House leadership will act on the bill is vanishingly small.

What's potentially bigger news is the SEC investigation into whether private equity firms are inflating valuations and otherwise running afoul of the law. As Bloomberg's Joshua Gallu and Cristina Alesci reported yesterday:

The SEC late last year sent letters to several firms asking for details on fund investments and the valuation of assets, as well as communication with clients, according to the copy of a letter obtained by Bloomberg News. Among issues regulators are examining is whether firms use inflated valuations to attract investors when marketing new funds, a person familiar with the matter said last week.

Gallu and Alesci suggest that the SEC is focusing mainly on smaller private equity firms. Per their reporting, large firms like Blackstone Group LP (BX) and KKR & Co., have not been contacted. Bain Capital isn't mentioned in the story, but ranks among the larger firms. That's no doubt a relief to the Romney campaign, since any hint of wrongdoing involving Bain would command plenty of attention in the presidential campaign. But at a time when most voters are forming their initial impressions of private equity and deciding whether they're okay with it, anything that intensifies the negative impression created by Romney's opponents can't be helpful.

These attacks are, for the most part, perfectly valid: Obama's budget does (and does not) do all the things that Republicans are griping about. And it doesn't do much to cut the deficit, which Republicans are griping about, too. But that doesn't mean the budget will be unpopular with the general public. To the contrary, according to a United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll out this morning, Obama's budget ought to be wildly popular because it hews so closely to public desires about what should and should not be cut  in the interest of reducing the federal deficit.

In a nutshell, any politician looking to cut Social Security, Medicare, and -- to a lesser extent -- Medicaid does so at his or her own peril. On the other hand, poll respondents seemed perfectly willing to entertain cuts in military spending. All of this is nicely laid out in the chart above. 

Yet another complaint from Republicans is that Obama's budget is a purely political document. That's valid, too. But if this latest poll is any indication, it's pretty good politics.

The Obama budget is "political" because it carves out a liberal ideal of what future government spending and taxation might look like, especially in comparison to the Republican alternative that Ryan and his House colleagues are expected to unveil in the next few weeks. But it's also political in the sense that it casts into sharp relief many of the issues Democrats believe will be most harmful to Mitt Romney, the likely GOP presidential nominee.

For one thing, the Obama budget takes aim at the "carried interest deduction" that allows private equity barons to pay extremely low tax rates, such as Romney's 13.9 percent rate in 2010. Obama would tax dividends --- the source of much of Romney's recent income --- at the same rate as ordinary income. And the Obama budget would also enshrine the "Buffett rule," ensuring that millionaires such as Romney would pay a minimum tax rate of 30 percent.

Each of these provisions will be opposed by the overwhelming majority of Republicans, if not all of them. But opposing them will be especially tricky for Romney, since each of them would directly affect his tax burden. That effectively puts him in the position of having to argue that others --- not he --- should have to bear this burden. And that's a political argument the White House is eager to have.

President Obama isn't the only one shaking up campaign finance. House Democrats today introduced a new version of legislation that would require groups spending money in campaigns to disclose their donors. The original version, introduced in response to the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling in 2010, passed the House but was killed by a Senate Republican filibuster.

That allowed nonprofit groups -- such as Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS -- which reported spending $137 million to keep their donors hidden in the 2010 elections. Most of that money went to support Republicans, who took control of the House and reduced the Democratic majority in the Senate. Anticipating that even more money will be spent this fall, Democrats decided to act.

"The American people deserve a political system that is fair, transparent, and accountable," said Representative Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat and a bill co-sponsor. "They have a right to know who is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence them.''

With Republicans controlling the House, this new legislation isn't expected to go anywhere. And Senate Democrats, who fell one vote short of breaking the Republican filibuster in 2010, are fewer in number today and thus would have an even harder time overcoming opposition.

The proposal follows Obama's decision earlier this week to reverse his position and encourage his supporters to contribute to Democratic-leaning "Super PACs" -- which, although they can take in unlimited donations, must disclose their donors. The Obama super PAC, Priorities USA Action, also has a nonprofit arm that allows contributors to remain secret. -- Jonathan D. Salant (@JDSalant)

Next week, President Obama is set to meet with Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping (above), who is in line to become the country's next president. This is a fraught issue, not only because China looms so large in presidential and congressional elections, but because, as Bloomberg's Julianna Goldman explains in a great piece this morning, it puts Obama in the politically disadvantageous position of having to speak delicately about an important foreign competitor that his likely opponent, Mitt Romney, can tee off on (thus painting the president as a weak-kneed conciliator, etc.):

While Republican front-runner Mitt Romney has said he would slap sanctions on the Chinese for unfair trade practices and direct the Treasury Department to list China as a currency manipulator, Obama ... is seeking China's cooperation on broader global issues, including dealing with the nuclear ambitions of Iran and North Korea.

"Romney has the freedom to say those kinds of things," said [Tony] Fratto. "The president is boxed in by the reality of the policy environment and the very complicated relationship that it's his charge to maintain with China."

Rhetoric about China regularly becomes heated during campaigns as candidates make appeals to middle-income Americans concerned about jobs being shipped to cheaper labor markets. The U.S. had a $273 billion trade deficit with China in 2010.

Castigating China has been an effective tactic for both parties, especially in areas of the country like the Midwest that have suffered disproportionately from the weak economy. While the example du jour of electoral China-bashing is this extremely controversial ad by Republican Pete Hoekstra, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has also aggressively invoked the image of a "Chinese menace," such as in ads like this one and this one that it ran against Republican Senate candidate Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania in 2010.

As Goldman notes, candidate Obama didn't shy away from using China as a political weapon, famously calling President George W. Bush a "patsy" for not driving a harder bargain on trade talks. That's a lot tougher for him to do -- impossible, actually -- now that he's the one ultimately responsible for negotiations. That's a difficulty the Romney campaign is happy to exploit.

But don't expect a President Romney to live up to the tough talk if he makes it to the White House. As I wrote last November, there is a long, bipartisan history of presidential candidates thumping their chest about all they'll do to set China straight. With minor exceptions, few have tried --and those that did try failed.

(Photographer: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

Even the normally placid Mitt Romney has been known to erupt in fits of violent fantasy when his thoughts turn to the president's stewardship. "I am someone who believes in free enterprise,'' Romney declared at the CNN debate in South Carolina recently. "I think Adam Smith was right, and we're going to get hit hard by Barack Obama, but we're going to stuff it down his throat that it is capitalism and freedom that makes us strong.''

Driven by this sort of rhetoric, a conviction has taken hold among many conservatives that the president is actively hostile to the very idea of a market-based economy. That's a much different charge than the one Obama seemed likely to face just a few months ago -- not that he was too hostile to capitalism, but that he was too accommodating of it. Obama's indulgence toward the big Wall Street banks after the financial crisis once appeared to be his greatest vulnerability. Some Democrats in Congress can even pinpoint the date on which they believe the American public turned against them and the president, driven by disgust over Wall Street's unchecked excesses. It was March 15, 2009, when the news broke that executives at AIG would receive millions of dollars in bonuses.

For Obama, the danger of this latter, now mostly forgotten, line of attack is that unlike the current one, it is true: He took a hands-off approach to the banks as part of a larger strategy to stem the crisis, a choice that he has never been very good at explaining, and thus has the potential to hurt him. His administration's strategy depended on private markets, rather than on the government, and entailed propping up the same banks that had wrought the damage.

When the administration came into office, the economy was shrinking at frightening speed. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and several of his colleagues had dealt with the financial crises in Mexico and Asian during the 1990s and believed they knew how best to stop this one. Along with fiscal stimulus and looser monetary policy, they considered it imperative to recapitalize the banking sector and get it lending again.

Traditionally, after a financial crisis, the government has furnished that money -- lots of it. Research by the Cleveland Fed puts the typical cost of such a bailout at 5 to 10 percent of GDP, which would have left US taxpayers on the hook for as much as $1.5 trillion. Obama's plan (really, Geithner's) was to persuade private investors to come up with that money. The "stress tests'' applied to the largest banks were meant to demonstrate that the banks weren't about to fail.

From a taxpayer standpoint, the strategy paid off. Investors provided the overwhelming bulk of the needed capital. The catch was that in order to attract them, Obama couldn't actively interfere with the banks by, for instance, firing CEOs or revoking bonuses, for fear of frightening away the very investors his plan relied on. Pursuing that plan entailed taking an enormous political risk, because it meant that the White House would have to ignore the clamor to punish the malefactors. But as Geithner likes to put it, "In a crisis, you have to choose: Are you going to solve the problem, or are you going to teach people a lesson? They're in direct conflict.''

Two years later, the economy is growing again, albeit slowly and fitfully. In an election campaign supposed to be a referendum on Barack Obama's first term, it would be useful to debate the efficacy of his actions to stop the crisis and heal the economy. But that's not the debate that's taking place out on the trail, at least not in any rational sense. Calling the president a socialist may, regrettably, yield some benefit in the GOP primary. But it's impossible to claim that Obama is both a socialist and also a pawn of Wall Street -- and by opting for the former, Republicans have probably chosen the weaker line of attack.

Joshua Green writes a weekly column for the Boston Globe. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaGreen.

Newt Gingrich believes so firmly in American technological prowess that he wants to build a moon colony. Here on earth, a group of tech savvy Newt-supporters has built something that probably holds more potential in the near term: a "Newt app" for mobile phones.

The official name is "Street Teams: Digital Strike Force for Newt in Florida," but we're just calling it the Newt App. It's an Android App developed by social media boy wonder Michael Hendrix. When I last wrote about Hendrix he was running the Facebook ad campaign that helped propel GOP Congresswoman Michele Bachmann to a surprising victory at the Ames Straw Poll in Iowa last August.

As the Bachmann campaign ran low on cash, Hendrix turned his sights to helping Newt win Florida. The Newt App is a twist on traditional door-to-door canvassing, one that turns it into a social-local-mobile software experience.

Here's how it works: From the comfort of your living room, download the app on your smartphone. Immediately, it will display a map of your neighborhood, with each house marked for its voter registration (Hendrix pulled the data from the Florida Elections Commission.). In addition to the excitement of being privy to your neighbors' political leanings, you're now ready to start knocking on doors. (You won't have to waste time on the Democrats.) If the person whose door you're knocking on already plans to vote for Newt, you'll upload that information through the app, which feeds it back to the campaign in real-time. You can poll people on their top issues, and survey whether Republicans in your neighborhood care more about abortion, school quality, or illegal immigration. Or moon colonies. If you encounter an undecided voter, the app provides funware points for convincing them to go with your guy. You might even win a ride on the campaign bus with Newt! In the game-ification era, Street Teams volunteers are not just working to elect Newt but competing against one another for prizes.

Since Hendrix launched the app last Thursday, he claims 70 people have downloaded it, and together polled 48,000 Florida voters in seven cities -- a helpful boost to a campaign that can't afford to fund a traditional ground game. As for Hendrix himself, he's been canvassing the state on a charter bus filled with other conservative tech nerds, including fellow app creator, Taylor Cavanah, CEO of the popular location-based software company Locai. Downloaders included members of local Tea Party groups, Republican groups from the University of Central Florida, and elected officials such as Georgia state senator Judson Hill.

Besides being cool, Hendrix's idea has obvious applications for other Republican campaigns. (The Obama campaign has begun issuing Square mobile credit card readers to field staff, which will enable them to accept and process donations from their phones, right on people's doorsteps.)

But Hendrix won't be selling Street Teams to just anyone. "I wouldn't sell this to the Obama campaign," he told me. "I'd be selling out my conscience. Street Teams will only be available to
Republicans seeking office." Whether or Newt makes it far beyond Florida remains to be seen. But it seems a good bet that the Newt app will make it all the way to the convention, and beyond. -- Elizabeth Dwoskin

Romney's leadership of Bain Capital was supposed to be the basis of his candidacy, something that would present him as an attractive alternative to a novice president struggling to right the economy. Instead, it has become a glaring liability.

That's astonishing in the context of a Republican primary, and it's mainly his own fault. He's in this uncomfortable position because he assumed that the value of his business experience didn't need to be explained to Republican voters - that its virtue was self-evident simply because, as he likes to put it, he spent the bulk of his career "in the private sector, not the public sector.''

At one point, that looked as if it might close the deal. Romney felt comfortable enough to enter the race late and initially refrained from attacking his opponents, none of whom enjoyed his stature. Cautious by nature, he limited himself to platitudes ("I believe in America''). But by neglecting to present his Bain career in a way that made these skills seem presidential, he let others shape the public's impression of him. And when his record was attacked, his only response was to claim defensively that his critics just envied his wealth - a claim that isn't very convincing (they're trying to inflict political damage) or attractive coming from a man worth something like a quarter billion dollars.

What's puzzling about Romney's struggles is that his executive skills at Bain have been well-documented, and to present them positively in a presidential campaign doesn't seem all that difficult.

A good place to start would be his rescue of Bain & Company, where he began his career, and returned as CEO in 1991 when the firm was near collapse. Looking to cash out, Bain's senior partners had sold their interest to the junior ones, but in the process overloaded the firm with debt, which pitted the two groups against each other. Romney convinced all the partners to give him authority and negotiated a deal whereby all were appeased, and Bain went on to thrive. Not a perfect analog to bringing Democrats and Republicans together to fix Washington - but not too bad of one either.

Instead, Romney has come to be defined as personifying the very worst kind of business executive. Gingrich, who shouldn't have much ground to attack anyone, has been his most relentless and effective critic. Assailing Romney's views on immigration yesterday, he said, "I think you have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts and automatic - you know, $20 million a year of no work - to have a fantasy this far from reality.''

That characterization is rapidly taking hold. Romney has responded in kind by denouncing Gingrich's highly paid Washington lobbying. But he still hasn't shown an inclination to get his own career back a positive light.

Romney has enough money that he could very well dispatch Gingrich without ever addressing his own problem. But his candidacy probably hinges on his doing so before much longer. If he wins the nomination, his next opponent will have even less compunction about casting his career in the worst possible light - and unlike Gingrich, Obama will have the money to make sure the impression sticks.

Joshua Green writes a weekly column for the Boston Globe. Follow him on Twitter @JoshuaGreen.