The speech wasn’t as aggressively awful as his Iowa Caucus night speech, but his reworked stump speech still isn’t much good. He is trying to run as human placebo. He needs to kill a couple of lines that he has fallen in love with. I’m talkinng about lines like:
1. The one about restoring rather than transforming America. It was obnoxiously passive-aggressive when Glenn Beck was selling this line.
2. The one about the Obama administration being a “detour not a destiny.” It isn’t a clever way to make the point that we can do better. It isn’t even an improvement over just saying we can do better.
The thing is Romney is much better when he has something to say. He was pretty good at giving us actual reasons why Gingrich should not be nominee or president. A focused, specific, Romney is a much better Romney.