I’ve never been part of a political campaign, but as an avid observer of them, I can imagine that they are a logistic challenge in perhaps every conceivable area. Mobilising hundreds, often thousands of volunteers as well as paid staff as effectively as possible over a relatively short space of time has to be the source of countless migraines.
No less of a headache must be the management of the messages of the campaign, and in America where the media pool is filled to the brim with politician-hungry sharks, you’d better watch what you say or end up watching what you said be echoed and commented upon and ripped apart ad nauseam, in the old media and the even more vicious new media.
It is precisely to help navigate the feeding frenzy that the concept of political talking point was invented – talking points are basically a set of key things that a campaign puts into the public domain in order to achieve some sort of consistency of the core message.
Usually, in order that all public representatives are speaking the same script, the central campaign machinery usually issues a talking points memo – judging from his changing public position on key issues both preceding his candidacy and during it, Mitt Romney doesn’t get his. There is actually a site – or several, rather – dedicated to Romney’s uncanny ability to say two directly opposing things with equivalent conviction, from his stance on key public policy issues like immigration and abortion, to personal facts like whether he owns a gun or not.
MittRomneyFlipFlops.com  has a simple but effective interface, a white screen with black text, two sourced quotes, outlining Romney’s contrasting positions on the same issue – you just need to refresh the page and a pair of quotes comes up. For example, on one page, you have the Romney quote “Roe v. Wade has gone too far…”, right over “I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years we should sustain and support it.”
Roe versus Wade was the landmark Supreme Court decision which, in summary, made abortions legal in the United States. An article earlier this year on the website, BusinessInsider.com, quoted Romney flip-flops on 14 different issues. During one interview, Romney states he is a gun-owner and a member of the controversial gun advocacy body, the National Rifle Association – four days later, in another interview, Romney states that he doesn’t own a gun but borrows his son’s.
Yet this is the man that has attracted the endorsement of the Republican party to run for the American presidency, as well as billions of dollars in corporate support. I used to think that George Bush Jr. represented the worst of what’s possible with the United State Presidency – with the Romney campaign gathering increasing momentum, I’m beginning to change my mind.
Say what you want to say about Bush and the negative sum effect of his policies both internal and external to the United States of America – it is safe to say that his actions stemmed from his personal convictions, however misguided and misled by his neo-conservative support machinery as they were.
Romney on the other hand seems to be a shell, a poster-boy for a rabid Republican capitalist agenda, not so much a man with clear policy positions of his own, as an opportunistic political creature composed almost entirely of talking points geared towards attracting as many voters as possible at any given moment.
There is the saying that he who pays the piper calls the tune – what I see in Romney’s ability to change his own tune without scruples, and the sort of interests that are aligning to fund his campaign to the tune of what is estimated to end up one billion US dollars. Obama most recently summed up the danger in a recent appeal to his support base, as reported by the Daily Beast website.
“I’m asking you to meet or exceed what you did in 2008. Because we’re going to have to deal with these super  PACs in a serious way. And if we don’t, frankly I think the political [scene] is going to be changed permanently. Because  the special interests that are financing my opponent’s campaign are just going to consolidate themselves. They’re gonna run Congress and the White House.”
This message, over the next few months, may become a talking point for the Obama campaign, but it is one talking point I wholeheartedly agree with.
Below is a summary of what Governor Romney promises to get done on his first day of being elected president of the United States:

Mitt Romney’s 1st Day In Office
1. Repeal the health care law (Obamacare);
2. Immediately approves the Keystone pipeline, creating thousands of jobs that Obama blocked
3. Begins repealing job-killing regulations that are costing the economy billions
4. Reduces the corporate income tax rate to 25 percent
5. Reinstates the president’s Trade Promotion  Authority to facilitate negotiation of new trade agreements
6. Directs the Department of the Interior to undertake a comprehensive survey of American energy reserves in partnership with exploration  companies and initiates leasing in all areas currently approved for exploration
7. Consolidates the sprawl of federal retraining programs and returns funding and responsibility for these programs to the states
8. Immediately cuts non-security discretionary spending by 5 percent, reducing the annual federal budget by $20 billion
9. Directs all agencies to immediately initiate the elimination of Obama-era regulations that unduly burden the economy or job creation, and then caps annual increases in regulatory costs at zero dollars
10. Directs the Department of the Interior to implement a process for rapid issuance of drilling permits to developers with established safety records seeking to use pre-approved techniques in pre-approved areas
11. Directs the Department of the Treasury to list China as a currency manipulator in its biannual report and directs the Department of Commerce to assess countervailing duties on Chinese imports if China does not quickly move to float its currency
12. Reverses the executive orders issued by President Obama that tilt the playing field in favor of organized labor, including the one encouraging the use of union labor on major government construction projects

As a result of these things that he has to do, he would not be able to attend the inaugural ball.