US Election 2012: a tired Mitt Romney slumps towards Michigan As he addresses the Millford Tea Party meeting, there is scant evidence of it. Dressed in blue jeans and an opened-necked shirt that are intended to make him look more relaxed and approachable, but somehow don't, Mr Romney tries to tap into his hometown roots, recalling the house in Detroit where he spent the first five years of his life. "We had a home there," Mr Romney recalled, "it has been bulldozed now, because it turned, I guess, into an eyesore, or a place where drugs were being used, so they had to tear it down. It was a lovely home. And at that time, Detroit was really the pride of the nation. For a man needing to beat a tribal drum, it is an oddly tepid, abstracted performance that quickly morphs into his standard stump speech promising to cut America's deficit, boost defence spending, slash regulation and repeal the "Obamacare" health reforms. After the event, even those who praise Mr Romney, do so in language that is low-fat; semi-skimmed. "He's very straight-forward," says one admirer, "he speaks plainly," agrees another, "he understands the need to cut back regulations, and I like that," offers a third. It is not exactly Romney-mania. Denis Hall, a construction photographer and self-professed Santorum supporter, puts more bluntly what too many Republicans for Mr Romney's comfort appear to believe: "Governor Romney's a good man, but honestly? It was a predictable, rather flat performance. It is Santorum that can re-awaken the heart of America. Certainly the national polls of Republicans show that it is Mr Santorum - "the guy out there on the high-wire, telling you what's in his heart, in his gut," as he described himself on the trail this week - who is connecting with the Republican base. That could all quickly change if Mr Romney wins in Michigan, catalysing a strong performance in Super Tuesday a week later, but the worry is that after two months of out-spending his opponents by five-to-one, and with a brilliant campaign attack-machine at his disposal, the former Massachusetts governor still can't get ahead. The search for reasons why the Romney campaign can't find its own heart beat, is perhaps buried in the story of Detroit itself, a city that was once the Silicon Valley of its day, but is now one of America's most desperate, segregated and unequal cities. The life stories of the two Romneys, is in many ways the story of America these past 50 years. George Romney was an icon of the Motor City in a different age, rescuing and rebuilding American Motors in the late 1950s by spotting the market for small, fuel-efficient cars among middle class Americans which made AMC's "Rambler" the third-most popular car of the 1960s. But while his father's back-story was all about building an America manufacturing icon, Mitt Romney's own career as a turnaround man with Bain Capital often sounds to ordinary Americans to be about breaking companies, primarily for the benefit of the elite "one per cent." As a man who grew up in Bloomfield Hills, one of America's richest enclaves a half-hour drive outside Detroit where the family moved from that now-destroyed Detroit home when Mitt was five, Romney Jnr has no manufacturers grease on his hands. In political playbook jargon, Mitt "needs a narrative." To his detractors, he appears to seek office from a cloud of privilege that wafted him effortlessly from Bloomfield's elite Cranbrook School and the paneled rooms of its private Country Club, to that factory of masters of the universe, Harvard Business School. Others wonder if the problem is not so much privilege - George W Bush was cut from similar cloth - but a defect in Mitt's political genes. George Romney, was a lauded as a great governor, however political historians recall how his limitations as a national politician were cruelly exposed during his brief 1967 campaign for the Republican nomination that was won by a sure-footed Richard Nixon. The George Romney campaign - whose memorabilia litters Mitt Romney's 2012 campaign bus - fell apart after he tried to explain a flip-flop on the Vietnam war by arguing weakly he had been "brainwashed" into supporting the conflict by the Johnson administration during a visit in 1965. "George Romney was a highly successful executive, but once put to the test, he failed, he flopped, he bobbled the ball, as it were," recalled Jeffery Lord, "Is the son, in his own fashion, repeating this?" But whatever the problem, even some of the Romneys" old neighbours at the Bloomfield Country Club wonder if Mitt, despite personal success that netted him a $250m fortune, has what it takes to make it in politics. Hoot McInerney, an 83-year-old multi-millionaire car dealer who remembers George Romney strolling most mornings down the Par-5 eight at Bloomfield Hills on whose fairway his 17-bedroom baronial mansion sits, admits he is among the doubters. Obama scares the sh*t out of me. He's a rat, and you need someone down on his level to take him on," he told The Telegraph, "Mitt's too flighty, he hasn't got the fight. I like this other guy, Santorum. Mr Romney will be praying this Sunday that too many of Michigan's primary voters don't feel the same way.