Los donantes le piden más agresividad a Romney

POLITICO.com:

Newt Gingrich’s surge is prompting the first signs of nervousness among top Mitt Romney supporters, some of whom are urging their candidate to take a more aggressive approach to arrest the former House speaker’s sudden rise.

Romney’s backers aren’t panicking — yet. But to many, especially among the GOP donor elite, Gingrich looks like Romney’s most formidable opponent to date, and a rival who requires a much more serious response than the previous conservative alternative, Herman Cain.

(...) “I have disagreed with his strategy,” said former Senate GOP Leader Trent Lott, an early Romney backer who has helped him raise money. “I think he could’ve closed the deal out before now. He’s run a little too much of a risk-averse campaign. I would have liked for him to have had a higher profile, been more aggressive — so it didn’t wind up as Romney and one other.”

Now that such a binary choice appears increasingly likely, some high-profile Romney contributors think it’s time to get tough with the former House speaker.

“I think he ought to be a little bit more aggressive now and much more aggressive shortly after the first of the year,” said Ted Welch, one of the country’s top Republican donors and Romney’s Tennessee co-chair.

Asked what other Romney contributors were saying, Welch, a former Republican National Committee finance chair, responded: “Most feel good about him — and say it’s time to be a little bit more aggressive and then accelerate as needed.”

Even as Romney donors remain confident of their candidate’s chances, they say the former Massachusetts governor will have to deliver a more explicit contrast message against Gingrich, whose long but familiar experience in national politics may make him more difficult to define in negative terms.

“Over the coming weeks, [Romney will] probably have to do that, draw a bit of a brighter line between their experiences and their lifetimes and how that has informed them as candidates,” said Peter Cianchette, a Maine-based Romney donor who was ambassador to Costa Rica under George W. Bush. “I believe he’ll do that in a way that is respectful, but yet really says that our job as candidates is to provide that bright line.”

As the race focuses on which candidate has “integrity, stature, selflessness and general leadership abilities,” Cianchette predicted, Romney will be the obvious choice.

(...) “If Newt is the nominee, he’ll hurt our chances everywhere — House, Senate, etc.,” said a Republican lobbyist who is backing Romney. “Everyone thinks Romney hangs on [and still wins the nomination]. I’m not so sure.”

This Romney supporter’s idea for pushback? “Marianne Gingrich needs to cut an ad in Iowa and South Carolina.”

That would be the candidate’s second wife, whom he divorced after carrying on an affair with his current wife, Callista.

Not every Romney supporter wants to go to that political equivalent of nuclear war right now, but conversations with high-profile backers of Romney reveal an unmistakable sense that Gingrich is for real and not a so-called “flavor of the month.”

(...) One former RNC chair said there’s “no question” that the Romney camp’s pulse has begun racing and that Boston is being urged to confront Gingrich.

“I do know that that the message is coming through to them that, ‘You need to have a third party going after Newt and if you can’t do it that way you’ve got to do it yourself,’” said the former chair.

(...) The debate now taking place among Romney’s supporters is whether — and how soon — such a newly sharpened focus ought to include direct attacks on Gingrich.

One high-profile GOP official said, because of the Cain collapse and the proximity of the Iowa and New Hampshire contests, the answer is yes.

“He’s got to do it now and artfully,” said this Republican, suggesting a combined focus on Gingrich’s past policy positions and his purported lack of electability. “If you poke Newt he gets riled. They don’t have time to bank on [Gingrich imploding on his own].”