Romney aide infighting begins, they're talking to the press!

And let the games begin. When the ship starts sinking, the rats start talking to the media (to mix my metaphors). The article reads like an election post-mortem. I was waiting for these stories to begin - where insiders start talking about other insiders to deflect the blame for losing the election. I just didn't think they'd start this early.

This article is very good news for our side.

The Daily Beast's spin on this echoes mine:

Just eight days before the most important speech of Mitt Romney's campaign, his top strategist, Stuart Stevens, junked it and created a new one for the Republican National Convention. Politico reports on escalating instability within the Romney campaign that is pushing Obama into an early lead, especially after the disastrous RNC. "The hasty process resulted in a colossal oversight: Romney did not include a salute to troops serving in war zones, and did not mention Al Qaeda or Afghanistan, putting him on the defensive on national security just as the Middle East was about to erupt," Politico reports. Stevens seems to have taken on too much and the results could be disastrous for the campaign.

This is very bad for Romney. At some point, big donors are going to stop giving big bucks to a candidate who's going to lose. In any venture, you stop throwing good money after bad.

From Politico, first we learn of how they scrapped Romney's speech 8 days before the convention, and started anew, which totally screwed things up:

The hasty process resulted in a colossal oversight: Romney did not include a salute to troops serving in war zones, and did not mention Al Qaeda or Afghanistan, putting him on the defensive on national security just as the Middle East was about to erupt. It was also very light on policy specifics, much to the chagrin of conservatives who were certain the addition of Ryan and inclusion of Wehner meant a real battle of ideas was about to begin.

The damage had been compounded when, in compressing the program from four days to three because of a hurricane delay, convention organizers had scrapped a planned remote appearance by Romney and veterans that was to be fed live into the Tampa hall from a speech he was giving to an American Legion convention in Indiana. With the salute-the-troops tribute out, the assumption was Romney would pay tribute to them in the speech. He didn’t.

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.