Romney's guru

Between the production values and Zell Miller, the mix of TV gloss and stump-speech populism made for supersized propaganda... Mr. Schriefer’s partner, Stuart Stevens, assembled the seven-minute nominating film that introduced Mr. Bush on Thursday, Sept. 2. It was series of photographic stills depicting the President as a hero after the Sept. 11 attacks: his bullhorn moment at Ground Zero; running with a soldier who lost his leg; hugging a girl whose mother perished in the attacks; and his opening pitch at Yankee Stadium for the stirring post–Sept. 11 season opener-the only moving video image.

“You keep pitching, no matter what,” intoned actor and former Senator Fred Thompson, in a baritone to match Morgan Freeman’s-who narrated John Kerry’s Democratic nomination film. “You throw, and you become who you are.”

The script was by former Reagan and Bush speechwriter and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan.

After it aired, Mr. Bush appeared magically-speaking of David Copperfield!-onstage, passing through two sliding video screens with American flags on them, and walked down the runway to the circular dais, which effectively became his pitcher’s mound.

“Sort of like a performance piece or something,” said Mr. Stevens. “Like the Academy Awards.”

Unfortunately for Romney, his chief strategist isn’t much better at navigating the minefield on the right. Stevens’s signature approach to dealing with conservatives is to slog through the primaries while conceding as little to them as possible. In 2007, he briefly worked on John McCain’s campaign for president. At the time, McCain was the moderate and Romney was challenging him from the right. Stevens urged McCain to go relentlessly negative—“you have to keep your foot on his throat” was his mantra. The idea was to solve McCain’s problem with his base by eliminating the conservative threat. But the McCain brain trust was perplexed. “The base’s concerns with John had nothing to do with Romney,” said one McCain aide. “It didn’t make logical sense to us.”

In 2012, Stevens sought to reprise the attack strategy for Romney, except with an added wrinkle. Rather than simply knee-cap his conservative rivals, Romney would also channel the country’s frustration with Obama. This would appeal to the base, which considered the president illegitimate, without alienating general election voters, who considered Obama’s economic policies a failure. Romney could capture the nomination without moving rightward. He wouldn’t even have to renounce his own health care plan so long as he was sufficiently scathing toward Obamacare.

Somewhat unusually for a presidential candidate, Romney has been deeply involved in hashing out his own campaign strategy. “Romney plays a big role in the strategic direction,” says one Romney aide. “Stuart is the artiste.” And Romney liked what he heard. He was especially hesitant to abandon his health care record and was heartened that Stevens urged him not to.

The problem was that the plan badly underestimated the fever on the right. “I don’t think [Stevens] understands the base at all,” says the McCain aide. “He tends to take [the base] for granted. ... There’s no art to what they’re doing.”

A Mitt Romney spokesperson offered an unusual counterattack Tuesday to an ad in which a laid-off steelworker blames the presumptive GOP nominee for his family losing health care: If that family had lived in Massachusetts, it would have been covered by the former governor’s universal health care law.

“To that point, if people had been in Massachusetts, under Governor Romney’s health care plan, they would have had health care,” Andrea Saul, Romney’s campaign press secretary, said during an appearance on Fox News. “There are a lot of people losing their jobs and losing their health care in President [Barack] Obama’s economy.”