Tired Mitt Romney in danger of losing it all

After nearly a decade of positioning himself for America's highest office, it is perhaps unsurprising that Mitt Romney looks tired as he walks into a crowd of voluble Tea Party supporters in his home state of Michigan, pausing to greet the room with his familiar wooden wave.

The performance is typical of candidate Romney: an awkward half-hug with one supporter followed by a rather manically overenthusiastic reception of another, a US Air Force veteran who says that he knew Mitt's father. "He was quite a guy!" agrees Mr Romney. "Quite a guy!"

The bonhomie belies the fact that this weekend Mr Romney - whose father, George, was a hugely popular three-term governor of Michigan - is fighting for his political life after polls showed him in danger of losing his home state in Tuesday's Republican primary.

As he runs neck-and-neck with the socially conservative Rick Santorum, Republican party grandees have made it clear that if Mr Romney cannot hold Michigan then his claim to be the man to beat President Barack Obama in November would look very close to untenable.

This week, Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and party chairman, became the most senior figure to voice those fears, while Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor whom some Republicans had hoped would run, warned that the increasingly extreme language of the candidates was in danger of alienating voters.

"For Romney to lose in Michigan is like a Kennedy losing in Massachusetts," says Jeffrey Lord, a Republican party historian and commentator. "This is his turf, his home. His family is immutably identified with Michigan, and Detroit and the auto industry. This was supposed to be a cake walk for him, and it has definitely not turned out to be that."

As a former Bain management consultant who saved the 2002 Winter Olympics from disaster, Mr Romney, a fit-looking 64 year-old, is no stranger to crisis management and working long hours.

But it is the more intangible, ineffable kind of political energy that he desperately needs to find to ignite his campaign. As he addresses the Millford Tea Party meeting, there is scant evidence of it.

Dressed in blue jeans and an open-necked shirt - which are intended to make him look more relaxed and approachable, but somehow don't - Mr Romney tries to tap into his hometown roots, recalling the house in Detroit where he spent the first five years of his life. "We had a home there," Mr Romney recalled, "it has been bulldozed now, because it turned, I guess, into an eyesore, or a place where drugs were being used, so they had to tear it down.

"It was a lovely home. And at that time, Detroit was really the pride of the nation."

For a man needing to beat a tribal drum, it is an oddly tepid, abstracted performance that quickly morphs into his standard stump speech promising to cut America's deficit, boost defence spending, slash regulation and repeal the "Obamacare" health reforms.

 After the event, even those who praise Mr Romney, do so in language that is low-fat, semi-skimmed. "He's very straightforward," says one admirer. "He speaks plainly," agrees another. It is not exactly Romney-mania. Deni Hall, a construction photographer and self-professed Santorum supporter, puts more bluntly what too many Republicans for Mr Romney's comfort appear to believe: "Governor Romney's a good man, but honestly? It was a predictable, rather flat performance. It is Santorum that can reawaken the heart of America."

Certainly the national polls of Republicans show that it is Mr Santorum who is connecting with the Republican base. That could all quickly change if Mr Romney wins in Michigan, and follows it with a strong performance in Super Tuesday a week later. But in political jargon he "needs a narrative".

To his detractors, he appears to seek office from a cloud of privilege that wafted him effortlessly from Bloomfield's elite Cranbrook School and the panelled rooms of its private Country Club, to that factory of masters of the universe, Harvard Business School.

Others wonder if the problem is not so much privilege - George W Bush was cut from similar cloth - but a defect in Mitt Romney's political genes.

George Romney was lauded as a great governor. However, political historians recall how his limitations as a national politician were cruelly exposed during his brief 1967 campaign for the Republican nomination that was won by a sure-footed Richard Nixon.

The George Romney campaign - whose memorabilia litters Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign bus - fell apart after he tried to explain a flip-flop on the Vietnam War by arguing weakly that he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the conflict by the Johnson administration during a visit in 1965.

"George Romney was a highly successful executive, but once put to the test, he failed, he flopped, he bobbled the ball, as it were," recalled Jeffery Lord. "Is the son, in his own fashion, repeating this?"

Whatever the problem, even some of the Romneys' former neighbours at the Bloomfield Country Club wonder if Mitt, despite personal success that netted him a $250?million fortune, has what it takes to make it in politics.

Hoot McInerney, an 83-year-old multi-millionaire car dealer who remembers George Romney's morning strolls down the Par-5 eight at Bloomfield Hills, on whose fairway his 17-bedroom baronial mansion sits, admits he is among the doubters.

"Mitt's too flighty, he hasn't got the fight. I like this other guy, Santorum."

Mr Romney will be praying this Sunday that not too many of Michigan's primary voters feel the same way.