The lunchtime speech was delivered from the 30-yard line before 1,200 suited-up business leaders in folding chairs, in a stadium that usually holds 65,000. And his address to members of the Detroit Economic Club contained ideas the former Massachusetts governor has spelled out before. 
 
 One new tidbit came when Romney strayed from his prepared remarks to note that he has four cars, including his wife’s “couple of Cadillacs” — casually reminding voters in this economically depressed state of his wealth. 
 
 Romney was trying to show that he was gaining the upper hand in a contentious battle with Rick Santorum going into Tuesday’s Michigan primary. Santorum laid out his agenda for his first 100 days in office during an evening campaign stop in Michigan before jetting to Tennessee, a sign that he is also looking ahead to the following week’s Super Tuesday contests. 
 
 But at a moment when Romney wanted to project bigness and command, the optics of Ford Field did not help. 
 
 Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, Romney’s state campaign chairman, told reporters that Romney “lit up the house at Ford Field.” 
 
 Even Romney would probably not agree with that conclusion. He began his speech by warning his audience that it would be heavy on policy. “This is not exciting and barnburning, but it’s important,” he said. The crowd’s polite applause was lost in the silence that filled the massive indoor stadium. 
 
 Campaign officials said they were not responsible for the selection of Ford Field, and one adviser said he was “frustrated” that the speech was given in such a huge venue. 
 
 “I guess we had a hard time finding a large-enough place to meet — and this certainly is,” Romney said. 
 
 Some Republicans thought it was a bit too large. 
 
 “The pictures of an empty Ford Field are not helping Romney,” tweeted conservative radio host Laura Ingraham. “Poor staging and tepid response from hometown crowd.” 
 
 And this was Rush Limbaugh’s response on the air Friday: “Oh, look. Romney said his wife drives a couple of Cadillacs. . . . That’s how you relate to the people in Detroit.” 
 
 Democrats tweaked Romney for his showing all day. Obama campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt tweeted, “Romney speaks to empty stadium at monument to industry he would have let go,” while Democratic National Committee spokesman Brad Woodhouse e-mailed reporters a photo under the subject line, “They Just Can’t Get Enough of Mitt.” 
 
 The Detroit Economic Club arranged the event and sold tickets for it ($45 for members; $75 for non-members), and when two indoor venues sold out quickly, club officials moved the speech to Ford Field. ||||| DETROIT — Mitt Romney set out on Friday to deliver a sweeping and sober vision for how to revive the American economy in a major policy speech here. In the end, he delivered something else as well: an unintended lesson about how poor visuals and errant words can derail a candidate’s message in this modern political news culture. 
 
 In an unusual choice, Mr. Romney gave his speech inside Ford Field, a cavernous indoor football stadium with 65,000 seats. 
 
 To the television audience, it appeared perfectly normal. Mr. Romney could be seen standing at a lectern in front of a backdrop that had the logo of the Detroit Economic Club, the event’s host. And when the stadium audience of about 1,200 people clapped, they filled the screen as cameras panned across them. 
 
 But in the age of Twitter and the Internet, that is not all that matters. 
 
 Before Mr. Romney had uttered a word, reporters began posting pictures online showing the stadium from every available angle — almost empty, except for the chairs set up on the field itself, near the 20-yard line. 
 
 Row after row of barren blue seats across the giant stadium made the crowd seem minuscule. Through the rapid-fire, reality-reshaping powers of the Web, a storyline for the day began to take hold that undercut and detracted from Mr. Romney’s words: big speech, tiny crowd. 
 
 Ordinarily, such imagery might be overwhelmed by the news of the day: a highly anticipated, substantive address packed with previously unknown details. Mr. Romney called for a 20 percent cut in income taxes; handing control of federal welfare programs to the states; and creating private sector competition for Medicare services. 
 
 But the Romney campaign had leaked most of the speech’s contents several days ago, leaving members of the news media with little to focus on — except, of course, the scene itself. 
 
 The distractions did not end there. After Mr. Romney finished his remarks, he took a handful of questions from the audience. The final question seemed harmless: Why was Mr. Romney the best candidate to challenge President Obama? 
 
 But Mr. Romney veered off course. After ticking off his credentials as a businessman and a Washington outsider, he detailed his fleet of personal vehicles, trying to connect his love of cars with his love of Detroit. “I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pickup truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually.” 
 
 Two Cadillac SRXs, to be precise. The cost of each: $35,000 to $50,000. 
 
 Once again, Twitter feeds and news blogs lighted up with Mr. Romney’s latest casual reference to his extraordinary wealth — remarks reminiscent of the playful $10,000 bet he tried to make with Rick Perry during a debate, and his remark about liking to fire those who provide services to him. 
 
 (A campaign aide displeased by the fuss later said that Mrs. Romney owns a 2007 and a 2010 model SRX, a luxury crossover vehicle, keeping one at the family’s home in Massachusetts and the other at their beach house in California.) 
 
 Mr. Romney’s aides were quick to dismiss the clinical dissection of the candidate’s words and the location of his speech on Friday. 
 
 They said, for example, that the stadium had been selected because 1,200 tickets had been sold, and the original site could hold only 700 people. And the campaign had not selected Ford Field — that decision, aides said, was left to the Detroit Economic Club. 
 
 But their pushback did little to change the dynamics of the day. By the end of Friday, reporters had posted pictures of President Obama’s stadium speeches given at a similar point in his primary campaign four years ago. One, at a stadium in Hartford, was almost filled to capacity — about 16,000 seats. 
 
 Mr. Obama rallied with 14,000 in Boise, Idaho, 18,000 in Minneapolis and more than 20,000 in St. Louis in February 2008. 
 
 To be fair, Mr. Romney’s campaign did not treat this speech as a rally, making no attempt to fill the stadium. But in politics, it is always better to show an overly crowded site than an overly empty one. 
 
 Mr. Romney himself seemed in his speech to make light of the large space. 
 
 “I want to thank the folks at the Ford Field for making this space available for us — I guess we had a hard time finding a large enough place to meet, and this certainly is,” he said. 
 
 Mr. Romney may take comfort in knowing he is not the first presidential candidate who ended up with unfortunate images in a stadium. 
 
 Four years ago, Senator John McCain decided to make remarks at the Navy and Marine Corps Memorial Stadium, which has a capacity of 34,000. Mr. McCain, who attended the Naval Academy as a young man, wanted to make a point about his credentials and history. 
 
 Unfortunately for Mr. McCain, the event was a small one: his campaign had set up 64 chairs in a small corner of the stadium. ||||| Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney's much-heralded economic speech flopped Friday, overshadowed by a gaffe over luxury Cadillacs and his choice of an over-ambitious venue, the Detroit Lions' football field. 
 
 Romney opened himself up to derision for choosing a 70,000-seat stadium which attracted just over 1,000 people, many of them school children bussed in to help fill out the crowd, tucked into a corner of the astro-turf pitch. 
 
 The small crowd underlined again his inability to draw large numbers of supporters and to excite the conservative base. 
 
 The speech too turned out to be a flop. Having been hyped by his campaign staff all week, Romney had little new to say, particulary about how he planned to pay for the 20% tax cuts he announced earlier in the week. 
 
 It will be the picture of the near-empty stadium, contrasting with a much fuller one when Barack Obama was campaigning in February 2008, that will be remembered. 
 
 The organisers, defending the venue, said that the original location had been filled within 90 minutes of the speech being announced so they had looked for an alternative, opting for Ford Field. 
 
 Romney commented on the vast stadium as began his speech. "I want to thank the folks at the Ford Field for making this space available for us," he said. "I guess we had a hard time finding a large enough place to meet and this certainly is." 
 
 Highlighting the smallness of the crowd, his words echoed round the empty stadium seats. He was not helped by the near-silence, winning only an occasional round of applause. At one point, having made a joke about the reluctance of children to leave home, only a handful of people in the audience laughed, an embarrassing response that the empty stadium amplified. 
 
 Political opponents quickly waded in. Obama's campaign adviser, David Axelrod, in a tweet, wrote: "Judging from pictures, looks like Mitt pinned himself in inside the 20." 
 
 After delivering his speech, Romney made a throwaway remark about cars that will be replayed when the speech itself will have been long forgotten. 
 
 In an attempt to ingratiate himself in the motor capital of America and undo some of the damage caused by a call in 2008 to let the car industry go bankrupt rather than be bailed out by the federal government, he listed cars owned by himself and his wife Ann. 
 
 He would be a president who loves cars, he said. "I like the fact that most of the cars I see are Detroit-made automobiles. I drive a Mustang and a Chevy pick-up truck. Ann drives a couple of Cadillacs, actually. And I used to have a Dodge truck, so I used to have all three covered." 
 
 The remark, in an unscripted moment, will add to the image of Romney as so wealthy he can talk casually about his wife having not one but two Cadillacs. Although two cars are not unusual in American homes, two luxury Cadillacs, which range in price from $35,000 upwards, are not. 
 
 It is a mistake on par with his $10,000 bet in a televised debate with Texas governor Rick Perry. 
 
 Romney's fumble came on a day in which there was some solace in the polls, with two showing him overtaking rival Rick Santorum in Michigan ahead of the Tuesday primary. A Mitchell Research-Rosetta Stone survey put him on 36%, Santorum 33%, Ron Paul 12% and Newt Gingrich 9%. A Rasmussen poll put Romney on 40%, Santorum 34%, Paul 10% and Gingrich 9%. 
 
 Romney's team had billed the Detroit speech as a major economic one that would build on the 20% tax cuts he promised earlier in the week. But he had almost nothing new to say. 
 
 He described it as a "bold conservative plan" but failed, in the face of much scepticism about his tax cuts, to say how he planned to pay for them. The one new line was that he planned to raise the age for Medicare from 65. 
 
 He reiterated he would balance the budget by handing over many federal programmes, such as Medicare and distribution of food stamps, to states, who he claimed would handle them more efficiently. He would cut subsidies to rail provider Amtrak and groups such as Planned Parenthood. 
 
 He has said most of this before. As for the question of how to cut tax and balance the budget, he opted for vagueness rather than detail, saying that if he was president, he would order every federal programme to be scrutinised to see whether it was worth borrowing from the Chinese to support.
– Team Romney must want a do-over. Coverage of a much-hyped economic speech at Detroit's Ford Field yesterday is getting attention mainly for two things: His poorly received ad lib about owning a few Cadillacs and, more prominently, all those empty seats. A few examples: Washington Post: "Empty seats steal thunder," reads the headline. "At a moment when Romney wanted to project bigness and command, the optics of Ford Field did not help," notes the story. (It adds that he offered nothing much new in speech, because most of the details had been leaked days in advance.) New York Times: "Message lost in the empty seats," says its headline. Romney got "an unintended lesson about how poor visuals and errant words can derail a candidate’s message in this modern political news culture." Guardian: "Speech falls flat at near-empty stadium," reads the headline. And from the text: "The small crowd underlined again his inability to draw large numbers of supporters and to excite the conservative base." The irony: The Detroit Economic Club, not the Romney campaign, chose the venue, and only because the original location was too small to hold the 1,200 people who bought tickets.