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Mitt Romney spent weeks battling Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich for the Republican presidential nomination, and he faced blistering attacks from Rick Perry and other GOP rivals along the way. And now he is paying the price.

Romney's failure to surpass Barack Obama this summer stems in no small part from his reluctance to make any bold moves on policy, and this reluctance is a direct product of the beating he's taken from conservative critics for much of the last year.

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Mitt Romney's unfavorable rating is up, most Americans think the Republican presidential challenger favors the rich, and it appears the number of people who believe that the economy will not get better if Romney is elected has edged up slightly, according to a new national poll.

The basic rap on Romney -- who represented, let us not forget, the conservative alternative to John McCain during the 2008 race for the Republican presidential nomination -- was that he wasn't sufficiently conservative. To reassure conservative primary voters, Romney embraced positions on a wide range of issues, from immigration to taxes, that are more popular among reliable Republicans than among swing voters.

It all adds up to a seven point advantage for President Barack Obama over the former Massachusetts governor, with 52% of registered voters questioned in the survey saying that they'd vote to re-elect the president and 45% backing Romney.

"Among independent voters, the poll indicates President Obama has a 53%-42% lead," CNN Polling Director Keating Holland said. "The president holds a nine point advantage among women voters and a smaller six point edge among men."

Most significantly, it appears that Romney's image as a can-do guy on the economy may have also been hurt. In May, 50% of all Americans said that the economy would get better if Romney were elected. That's now down to 45%, two points below Obama's number.

Regardless of which candidate they support, 63% think Obama will win re-election, with one third saying Romney will win. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/08/09/cnn-poll-obama-holds-7
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As the political analyst Sean Trende, author of "The Lost Majority," has argued, the central dilemma facing the Romney campaign is that it has essentially secured all of the low-to-medium hanging fruit for a Republican presidential candidate by condemning Obama's economic record. Yet this hasn't been enough to give Romney a lead over the incumbent president.

Indeed, there is at least some reason to believe that the Romney campaign is losing ground. This strongly suggests that the GOP needs a more positive message with crossover appeal. The trouble, of course, is that Romney's efforts to inoculate himself against charges of squishiness have made it very difficult for him to pivot to the center.

Romney's evolution on tax policy is also telling.

During the 1996 New Hampshire GOP primary, Romney, a private citizen at the time, paid for an advertisement criticizing Steve Forbes' signature flat tax on the grounds that it was a giveaway to the ultra-rich. And his original 2012 tax proposal was a fairly modest one, which called for extending the Bush-era tax cuts while also eliminating taxes on capital gains, dividends and interest for married couples earning less than $200,000.

The idea was that this would be a prelude to a larger tax code overhaul. But when Romney feared that Rick Santorum might defeat him in Michigan's crucial Republican primary, he released a far more ambitious, and far more expensive, tax cut proposal that is being criticized as pie-in-the-sky.

Right now, the Romney campaign seems to believe that it can defeat Obama by running a conventional and cautious campaign. But as the weeks go by and the president's lead remains frozen in place, this is starting to look like a bad bet. http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/09/opinion/salam-romney-struggle/index.html
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