Mitt Romney's Long Hot Summer What was true during the primary campaign is still true today: Mitt Romney hasn't figured out an effective way to answer attacks on Bain Capital or questions about his own finances, and his campaign hasn't figured out an effective way to change the subject. Instead, Romney has spent the last two weeks looking shifty and hairsplitting when he's on the defensive, and plaintive and whiny when he's gone on the attack. His ineffective complaints about the White House's scorched-earth strategy illustrate a solid rule of American politics: Never, ever, demand that your opponent apologize for a campaign attack unless you have some reasonable expectation that he actually might. His allies, meanwhile, have produced one memorably foolish distraction - last week's Condoleezza-Rice-for-vice-president balloon, pricked as soon as it was floated - and one memorably painful gaffe, in the form of Romney surrogate John Sununu's (hastily-retracted) suggestion that President Obama should "learn how to be American." To date, though, Romney's struggles have had no obvious impact on the polls. A month ago, when it was the Obama campaign that seemed to be staggering a bit, the RealClearPolitics polling average gave the incumbent only a sliver-thin advantage over Romney. Today, that lead has doubled - from one point to two. So Obama isn't actually being borne upward by the Bain contretemps any more than he was actually dragged down by his own "the private sector is doing fine" facepalm moment. Instead, public opinion has been remarkably stable since the spring, with both candidates moving up and down between the mid and high 40s, mostly within the margin of error. Therein lies the case that the Romney campaign, for all its recent troubles, is actually doing just fine. Given our current polarization, this was always likely to be a relatively close election, decided by voters who aren't paying attention at the moment, and who will probably never know or care what John Sununu said on a midsummer conference call. Viewed from this perspective, Romney is arguably still meeting his summertime expectations: He's consolidated his base and prevented the president from surging, and all the blows that he's absorbing are just toughening him up for the more important fall campaign. There is historical support for this case. The last two times an incumbent president was defeated by a challenger - Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George Bush in 1992 - the hinge moment arrived only in the last few months of the campaign. In 1980, it came after the lone debate, when Ronald Reagan's smooth, reassuring performance turned a tight race into a walkover. In 1992, it arrived with the Democratic Convention, when the one-two punch of Ross Perot's temporary exit and the Clinton campaign's skillful "place called Hope" showmanship propelled Bill Clinton to a lead he never relinquished. But if Romney aims to imitate those precedents, he needs to recognize what Clinton and Reagan accomplished in those hinge moments. In both the "92 convention and the "80 debate, the challenger successfully escaped from the caricature that his rival was intent on drawing. Cast as a womanizing, tax-and-spending liberal by the Bush White House, Clinton emerged from his convention rebranded as a family man and a genuine, up-by-his-bootstraps man of the people (in contrast to the patrician, out-of-touch incumbent). Cast as an anti-government radical by Democrats, Reagan emerged from the debate with Carter - thanks to his famous "there you go again" response to the claim that he opposed the existence of Medicare - as a safe, mainstream choice for the presidency. For Romney to accomplish the same feat, he will need to reassure voters that he represents something more than just a rubber stamp for the interests of the wealthiest Americans. And this is why his ineffective response to the Bain attacks should be troubling to Republicans: Not because he hasn't hit back hard enough, but because he hasn't been able to smoothly pivot from the basic conservative message - free enterprise good, big government bad - to the more supple arguments that might complicate the White House's efforts to caricature him as a Gordon Gekko. These arguments aren't hard to envision. They would involve supplementing his critiques of the Obama White House's crony capitalism with an acknowledgment of the financial sector's sins as well. They would involve supplementing his promise to repeal the Democratic health care legislation with a vision of what might actually replace it. They might involve returning to a theme that he struck in April, when he suggested that this election will come down to "jobs and kids," and offering more to struggling middle class parents than just a tax cut on their (meager) capital gains. On all of these fronts, there is a line in Reagan's first inaugural address that should be required reading for Romney's speechwriters and debate preparers. "Now, so there will be no misunderstanding," Reagan promised the country in that speech, "it is not my intention to do away with government. It is, rather, to make it work - work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. With these words, a much more ideological politician than the current Republican nominee promised Americans who didn't share his ideology that he understood their concerns. If Romney wants his summertime struggles to be a prelude to a victorious autumn, he needs to channel not only the Reagan of conservative legend, but the Reagan who knew how to woo and win non-conservatives too.