A look inside Mitt Romney's crumbling campaign.

Courtesy of Politico:  

Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s top strategist, knew his candidate’s convention speech needed a memorable mix of loft and grace if he was going to bound out of Tampa with an authentic chance to win the presidency. So Stevens, bypassing the speechwriting staff at the campaign’s Boston headquarters, assigned the sensitive task of drafting it to Peter Wehner, a veteran of the last three Republican White Houses and one of the party’s smarter wordsmiths. 

Stevens junked the entire thing, setting off a chaotic, eight-day scramble that would produce an hour of prime-time problems for Romney, including Clint Eastwood’s meandering monologue to an empty chair. 

Romney’s convention stumbles have provoked weeks of public griping and internal sniping about not only Romney but also his mercurial campaign muse, Stevens. Viewed warily by conservatives, known for his impulsiveness and described by a colleague as a “tortured artist,” Stevens has become the leading staff scapegoat for a campaign that suddenly is behind in a race that had been expected to stay neck and neck through Nov. 6. 

This article is based on accounts from Romney aides, advisers and friends, most of whom refused to speak on the record because they were recounting private discussions and offering direct criticism of the candidate and his staff, Stevens in particular.

This is the article that is getting mad attention on the cable  news outlets right now and the one that inspired the Romney campaign to pull Bay Buchanan out of mothballs, dust her off, and sic her on the media in defense of the clearly wounded Mitt the Twit.

Here is Politico's description of the Eastwood chair incident and the campaign's reaction to it.

The convention finale was undermined even further by Eastwood’s rambling comedy routine, which became the only glimpse that many swing voters got of the Republican show. Eastwood had been added to the program after chatting with Romney at a fundraiser in Idaho just weeks before the convention.

Stevens and his team loved the idea of the tough-talking American icon greeting the millions of viewers tuning in to the main event. But Eastwood, unlike every other speaker at the tightly controlled convention, had free rein to say or do whatever he wanted without the campaign’s approval. Eastwood has said just minutes before going live, he was handed a chair to sit on, which he promptly decided should become a prop in his speech. 

Many in the Romney high command watched in fury. Later, a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press found that for many voters — especially independents and casual viewers, exactly the ones convention organizers hoped to reach — the Eastwood skit, not Romney’s speech, was the highlight of the convention. 

This morning Bay Buchanan essentially kept making the case that Romney is the one in charge of his own campaign. (Here is video of her appearance on the Daily Rundown with Chuck Todd. Listen to her gasping for breath. she is channeling Palin for God's sake!))

That actually may be EXACTLY the problem here, as a candidate is judged as to how he would run the country by how he has run his campaign. And IF this campaign were to be compared to the Titanic, it would not have simply sunk by hitting ONE iceberg, it would have careened off of every iceberg in the vicinity before sinking to the icy depths below.

So far the message most Americans are receiving from this Keystone Kops style campaign is, "Hey I'm Mitt Romney, and I can't do shit right. But hey hire me to run the country, and I promise I will figure it out somehow."