Subject: Re: Iowa Predictions?
From: "Alexander Snyder-Mackler" <[email-masked]>
To: "Beau" <[email-masked]>
Cc: "Eric Schwerin" <[email-masked]>, "Hunter Biden" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 2011 12:04:48 -0500

I think Romney and Paul basically tie, Romney costs in NH, and then Rs have
to decide if they are any less uncomfortable with Ron Paul than they are
with Romney. Which means I think Romney has it wrapped up by Super Tuesday.
If you want to feel good about that, read this story:

December 27, 2011
The Retooled, Loose Romney, Guessing Voters’ Age and Ethnicity By ASHLEY
PARKER<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/ashley_parker/index.html?inline=nyt-per>and
MICHAEL
BARBARO<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/michael_barbaro/index.html?inline=nyt-per>

DAVENPORT, Iowa — When Mitt
Romney<http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney?inline=nyt-per>introduces
himself to voters, he has a peculiar habit of guessing their age
or nationality, often incorrectly. (A regular query: “Are you French
Canadian?”)

When making small talk with locals, he peppers the conversation with
curious details. (“We stayed in the Courtyard hotel last night,” he told a
woman at a diner. “It’s a LEED-certified hotel.”)

And when he encounters a question he particularly dislikes, he smiles
politely and behaves as if it never happened. (“Will you put Ron Paul in
your cabinet?” a man asked. The candidate turned away, inquiry left
unanswered.)

Mr. Romney’s bid for president this year is a carefully crafted do-over, a
chance to revise and retool a campaign that quickly fizzled out four years
ago. He has lost the tie, overhauled his stump speech and hired far fewer
campaign consultants.

But perhaps the trickiest part of this reinvention is changing who Mr.
Romney is when he steps out from behind the lectern and wades into a
roomful of voters: a cautious chief executive who is uneasy with
off-the-cuff remarks, unnatural at chitchat and spare with his emotions.

At coffee shops and veterans’ halls, on sidewalks and factory tours, the
reworked version, it turns out, is not all that different from the
original.

A close-up study of Mr. Romney’s casual interactions with voters captures a
candidate who can be efficient, funny and self-deprecating, yet often
strains to connect in a personal way.

Even those who praise his style after meeting him sometimes do so in ways
that feel backhanded: “I don’t mind stiff and formal,” said Holly Sirois,
who spoke to Mr. Romney a few days ago at a pizza shop in Newport, N.H. “I
don’t want the guy sitting in the backyard drinking beers with his buddies.
I want my president to act presidential.”

Mr. Romney has plenty of moments when he wins positive reactions and some
when he seems to make a genuine link, undercutting his caricature as
robotic. And he is hardly giving up on mastering the art of the soft sell:
he personally insisted on spending more hours talking to voters this
election and fewer sequestered in his Boston headquarters. The calculation
may prove crucial in a year when a procession of rivals — Rick Perry, Ron
Paul and Newt Gingrich — has roused the Republican base with colorful
personalities and dynamic speaking styles.

The informal, humanizing interactions are so essential to the campaign’s
image that Mr. Romney has scheduled back-to-back bus tours in New Hampshire
and Iowa, the latest of which began here in Davenport on Tuesday, crammed
with events like Coffee with Mitt, Pizza with Mitt and Spaghetti with Mitt.

“No one is an expert at it when they first do it,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a
senior adviser to Mr. Romney, who has watched him ring hundreds of
doorbells over the years. “There has been an improvement over time, just as
you would expect.”

Here is a guide to Mr. Romney’s habits and quirks on the campaign trail:

*Guesswork*

For a candidate who is exceedingly risk-averse, Mr. Romney has developed an
unlikely penchant for trying to puzzle out everything from voters’ personal
relationships to their ancestral homelands.

“Sisters?” he asked. (Nope, stepmother and stepdaughter.) “Your husband?”
he wondered. (No, just a friend from the neighborhood.) “Mother and
daughter?” he guessed. (Cousins, actually.)

The results can be awkward. “Daughter?” he asked a woman sitting with a man
and two younger girls at the diner in Tilton, N.H., on Friday morning. Her
face turned a shade of red. “Wife.”

Oh, Mr. Romney said. “It was a compliment, I guess,” said the woman,
Janelle Batchelder, 31. “At the same time, it was possibly an insult.”

Countries of origin are another Romney favorite. When a man in Bethlehem,
N.H., stood and introduced himself as Randall Loiacono, Mr. Romney asked,
“Now, is that a Northern European name?”

“Sicilian,” Mr. Loiacono said, before standing and spelling his name at Mr.
Romney’s request.

Mr. Romney relishes meeting young voters and rarely misses an opportunity
to guess their age.

“What are you, about 9, 10?” Mr. Romney asked a young boy, shaking his
gloved hand in a parking lot in Lancaster, N.H. “Seven,” the boy’s mom
said.

When another boy corrected Mr. Romney a few campaign stops later (he was
12, not 14), his aides burst into laughter at the familiar mistake. Mr.
Fehrnstrom called his boss’s frequent questions “an icebreaker.”

“It’s better than going around and trying to guess people’s weight,” Mr.
Fehrnstrom said. “It’s safe.”

*Congratulations*

Mr. Romney likes to congratulate people. For what, exactly, is not always
clear.

“Congratulations,” he told a grandmother at an event on Thursday night,
presumably because she had a large brood.

Over three consecutive days last week, he congratulated a girl who said she
was attending college, a woman who said she owned a small business and a
mother who said she was going back to school. “Congratulations!” he
exclaimed upon learning that a woman had three children.

Every candidate has default greetings, of course, standard lines that can
be trotted out almost mindlessly, day after day, hour after hour, room
after room.

“Good to see you,” Mr. Romney says.

“Hey, buddy, how are you?”

“Thanks for being here.”

Sometimes, when a voter brandishes a camera, his greetings become more
elaborate: “Hi, there. You know how to make that work? Ha-ha.”

Mr. Romney, never much of a hugger or backslapper, stands with his hands
straight down at his waist, tilting forward ever so slightly and turning
from side to side as he searches for the next hand to shake or poster to
sign.

In Bedford, N.H., he turned to find a man who proudly told him, “You
already have my vote.” It was the kind of comment that might normally
elicit an expression of gratitude, or an inquiry into the voter’s
background.

Mr. Romney replied, “Well, that’s good.”

*Dodging the Question*

Few candidates are as deft as Mr. Romney at genially brushing off unwelcome
queries and comments.

In Bedford, N.H., a woman walked up to him after a speech and declared: “I
have a lot friends who say you are the robotic type. And I am like, no, you
need to stay that way because you are a leader.”

Mr. Romney’s mouth arched into a somewhat pained smile as he rushed to
conclude the conversation. “Nice to see you guys,” he said as he walked
away.

A few moments later, a voter named David Rivers asked Mr. Romney whether
there would be place for Mr. Paul, a Texas congressman, in a Romney White
House. Mr. Romney treated the question as a joke, letting out a laugh and
walking on by.

“I was actually kind of serious,” Mr. Rivers said in an interview
afterward.

Sometimes Mr. Romney will engage in a back-and-forth with tough
questioners; in Concord, N.H., a woman told him that she favored socialized
medicine. “I’ve got someone for you,” Mr. Romney said. “His name is Barack
Obama. He agrees with you. Ha-ha.”

*Finding a Connection*

Mr. Romney’s fascination with arcane, technical information can
occasionally leave voters scratching their heads.

When he mentioned his hotel’s LEED designation — an imprimatur of energy
efficiency — to the woman in Keene, N.H., she acknowledged that she had no
idea what it meant. “Is it something to do with being green?” she asked
after he had moved on.

But his inner wonk has at times endeared him to potential supporters, as it
did at a farm supply store in Lancaster, when Mr. Romney began discussing
the intricacies of cow milk with Jessica Hebert, an Obama voter who was at
the store.

Mr. Romney delved deeply into the topic, with real curiosity and a barrage
of questions, after Ms. Hebert, who has shown dairy cows, explained that a
prize animal produced about 100 pounds of milk a day. He began a series of
rapid-fire calculations to determine how many gallons are in a pound:
“Eight-point-three pounds per gallon. So 8 into 100 is going to be about
13, 14, gallons. Oh, 12 — there you go.”

He beamed with satisfaction at solving the puzzle — and Ms. Hebert said she
liked what she had heard.

“That is a lot of milk,” Mr. Romney said.

On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 11:46 AM, Beau <[email-masked]> wrote:

> I have no idea
>
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> On Dec 28, 2011, at 10:12 AM, Eric Schwerin <[email-masked]>
> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> Eric D. Schwerin****
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-- 

Alexander Snyder-Mackler
(302) 598-867