US election: Mitt Romney moves to ‘reset’ flagging presidential campaign

“We do think the timing is right at this moment to reinforce more
specifics,” said Ed Gillespie, a senior Romney adviser, setting out the
campaign’s new direction.

However the reset was in danger of being undermined from the outset after
internal tensions within the Romney campaign broke out into the open after
anonymous aides accused Mr Romney’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, of
having the aura of a “mad professor”.

“I always have the impression Stuart must save his best stuff for
meetings I’m not important enough to attend. The campaign is filled with
people who spend a lot of their time either avoiding him or resisting him,”
a Romney insider, told Politico magazine in a back-biting news article.

It described the Romney campaign as “chaotic”, detailing how Mr
Stevens, 58, had commissioned two separate drafts of Mr Romney’s Convention
acceptance speech, only to rip both up, before penning the poorly-received
final version at the last minute with Mr Romney himself.

Back on the campaign trail yesterday Mr Romney moved to heal his relationship
with crucial Hispanic voters, after a primary season in which he tacked hard
to the right on immigration, advocating “self-deportation” and
rejecting plans to allow the children of illegal immigrants to win
citizenship.

“Americans may disagree about how to fix our immigration system, but I
think we can all agree that it is broken,” Mr Romney was due to say in
a speech Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles.

Mr Obama, meanwhile, was in the battleground state of Ohio in the industrial
Midwest, where he attempted to neutralise Mr Romney’s accusations that the
Obama administration has been soft on China’s bending of international trade
rules.

The president’s visit was timed with the announcement that the Obama
administration was filing a World Trade Organisation suit to complain about
$3bn of allegedly illegal subsidies that they claim are allowing Chinese
car-parts manufacturers to unfairly undercut US producers.

“I understand my opponent has been running around Ohio claiming he’s
going to roll up his sleeves and take the fight to China,” Mr Obama
told a crowd in Cincinnati, before accusing Mr Romney of taking advantage of
cheap Chinese labour while boss of Bain Capital private equity.

“Here’s the thing: his experience has been owning companies that were
called ‘pioneers’ in the business of outsourcing jobs to countries like
China. Pioneers! Ohio, you can’t stand up to China when all you’ve done is
send them our jobs.”

For his part, Mr Romney accused Mr Obama of “doing too little, too late”
and filing the WTO suit out of political expediency: “President Obama’s
credibility on this issue has long since vanished. I will not wait until the
last months of my presidency to stand up to China, or do so only when votes
are at stake,” he said.

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