Romney the Cautious - NYTimes.com Mitt Romney's vigorous denial notwithstanding, yesterday's report that his campaign isn't even planning to vet Florida Senator Marco Rubio as a potential vice presidential pick was entirely consistent with the kind of campaign that Team Romney appears intent on running. Rubio has long been cited as one of the most exciting running mates available - someone who would add youth, charisma and diversity to a ticket lacking all three. But with youth comes inexperience and with excitement comes risk, and lately the Romney campaign seems to have decided that they can win this election without taking any substantial risks at all. Presidential challengers often expend an enormous amount of energy trying to brand themselves as something new and fresh and different - a New Democrat, a compassionate conservative, an avatar for hope and change. Since he clinched his party's nomination, though, Romney has been content with the generic Republican mantle. More than content, in fact: To date, his general-election campaign seems carefully constructed to be as cautious and boring and even attention-repelling as possible. His stump speech is competent but entirely platitudinous. His policy positioning is technically quite conservative, but he clearly doesn't want to engage publicly with any issue where the politics are even remotely unsettled, from gay marriage to immigration. He certainly doesn't want to talk about his Mormon faith, arguably the most distinctive feature of his biography. He wants to talk only about the economy - but even there, his message is mostly as bland as pottage, a mix of anti-Obama talking points and right-of-center bromides that any Republican could deliver. The contrast with the White House's recent approach is striking. In effect, the challenger and the incumbent have reversed the traditional roles: Romney is running a kind of Rose Garden strategy, trying to stay above the fray and coast to victory, while the president bobs and weaves like an insurgent, trying to throw his Republican rival off his game. Every week, it seems, Obama has a new narrative, a new gambit, a new stratagem, or a new "game changing" speech. In Romneyland, by contrast, the keel is even and the message is always essentially the same. While the president has been reversing himself on hot-button issues and responding to bad unemployment figures by taking repeatedly to the bully pulpit, the riskiest move the presumptive Republican nominee has made in the last two months was his decision to attend a fund-raiser with Donald Trump - a bad call, in my view, but not nearly as significant as the president's repositioning on immigration or gay marriage. There are good reasons for Romney's caution. If the election were held today, with national polls showing a dead heat, the tendency of undecided voters to break against the incumbent would probably translate into a narrow Republican victory. From a certain angle, then, Romney looks like the favorite in this campaign, and for a favorite caution is often the better part of valor. This is particularly true in a political environment where voters are weary of both parties, and where heightened visibility for any politician tends to translate into sagging poll numbers rather than enthusiasm. But it's also possible that Romney is missing a significant opportunity, in this season of Democratic discontent, to define himself as something more than the just the not-Obama candidate. Recall that many of Romney's primary rivals were confident that being a not-Romney would be enough to win the Republican nomination, and that ultimately they were all disappointed. It's clear, for instance, that Obama's vulnerabilities with working class whites are threatening his position in must-win states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But these are not voters who tend to respond to conventional Republican talking points, especially when they're delivered by a multimillionaire private equity honcho. Nor are they voters with particularly fond memories of the economic results that the last Republican administration delivered. Romney may be able to win these voters by playing it safe and hoping the economy has done his work for him. But sometimes the best way to win a bloc of voters is to actually try to win them. In this case, that would probably mean offering a policy agenda more attuned to the ways in which recent Republican economic policy hasn't always delivered for middle-income voters - a health care agenda that promises more to the uninsured, say, or a tax agenda that's more family-friendly than the current Romney proposals. What applies in the Rust Belt applies nationally as well. As Yuval Levin wrote in a perceptive Weekly Standard essay several weeks ago, "the Romney campaign has yet to make an overarching case for the candidate," or "to state clearly the problem to which he offers up his economic policies as a solution." Instead, Romney is essentially implying that "all was well in America until we took a wrong turn four years ago and elected a president hostile to freedom and prosperity," which is a view that most Americans reject. To Romney's advisers, the fact that their candidate suddenly seems to have the presidency within his grasp no doubt feels like a solid case for standing pat with their current, cautious-to-a-fault message and campaign. There's a big difference, though, between having a prize within reach and actually grasping it. Right now, the November odds favor Romney. But June opportunities aren't always autumn realities, and when it comes to turning the first into the second, fortune still favors the bold.