By any measure , the Mitt Romney for president campaign has had a painfully bad week . What went wrong ? The bad news began Wednesday . That day , Romney addressed the NAACP convention in Houston . The speech was poorly received , so much so that Romney , in an interview that afternoon on Fox Business , told host Neil Cavuto that he had `` expected '' boos . Some interpreted that comment as proof that Romney had actually wanted to be booed by the NAACP in order to rev up elements of the conservative base . The Romney campaign next reacted by whispering to the Drudge Report ( which acts as a kind of message board for Romney ) that it was seriously considering Condoleezza Rice as a running mate . That story excited the press for half a day , until reporters remembered two hard realities : Party conservatives wo n't accept a pro-choice running mate , and Rice has made repeated public statements of lack of interest in the VP job . The NAACP story probably moved few votes . But it 's interesting in its own right -- and as a warning of the bigger trouble that hit the campaign on Thursday . The NAACP incident shows a hyperactive campaign war room , overcorrecting one way ( `` the boos are no big deal ; everything 's going according to plan ! '' ) and then overcorrecting the other way ( `` we were n't trying to generate TV images of racial confrontation ; why , look , here 's Condi Rice ! `` ) , spinning and counterspinning without any forethought for how this hour 's aggressive statement would sound when the next hour 's realities arrived . And it was that `` win the hour '' mentality that got the Romney campaign into much more serious trouble when the Obama campaign launched a big push on Romney 's business record the next day . Gergen : Obama 's charges vs. Romney do n't hold up . Thursday morning , the Obama campaign released a tough ad attacking the record of downsizing and outsourcing at Romney 's old firm , Bain Capital . The Romney campaign reacted with outrage . That same day , it announced a multimillion-dollar purchase of airtime for an ad that bluntly accused President Obama of lying . In support of the ad , Romney 's team argued that he had left Bain Capital in February 1999 ; the incidents alluded to by the Obama campaign all occurred after that date and had nothing to do with Romney . Wham . The first attack on Romney had been a jab , dropping Romney 's guard against the haymaker : On Friday , the Obama team counter-charged that it was Romney who was lying in his ads or who had committed a felony , lying on 140 official forms that he signed as CEO and sole shareholder of Bain between 1999 and 2002 . Romney now chased the Obama story , granting five TV interviews to reiterate his version of events . The more he talked , the more deeply into trouble he sank . By Sunday , even Romney supporters were urging the thing he wants least : release of more income tax returns . And here again , what got Romney into the trouble was his war room . It was the too-fierce response to Attack 1 -- the adamant insistence that Romney had nothing , nothing to do with anything that happened at Bain after February 1999 -- that set up Romney for Attack 2 : Did he lie on SEC forms ? And now he will struggle through the rest of the election trying to reconcile his answers . Yes , it is technically true that Romney ended his operational role at Bain before he ended his titular role . It was also technically true ( as Josh Marshall points out ) that John Kerry did vote for the $ 87 billion before he voted against it . Romney 's core problem is this : He heads a party that must win two-thirds of the white working-class vote in presidential elections to compensate for its weakness in almost every demographic category . The white working class is the most pessimistic and alienated group in the electorate , and it especially fears and dislikes the kind of financial methods that gained Romney his fortune . Romney has a strong potential defense : Bain was in the business of making companies more efficient and profitable . Downsizing and outsourcing were necessary -- and often indispensable -- means to that end . In a growing economy , the workers who lost their jobs should find new jobs elsewhere , and it 's precisely the relentless search for profitability that causes economies to grow in the first place . That 's an argument that , to borrow an old joke of Henry Kissinger 's , is not only convincing but has the additional merit of being true . However , it 's not an argument that appeals much to the voters Romney most intensely needs to win . Hence his unleashing of the war room -- but in the end , there 's only so much a war room can do . And this time , by trying to do too much , the Romney war room may have blasted its own side with lethal friendly fire . Follow @ CNNOpinion on Twitter .
Bain : Frum difficult week pointed to a key aspect of his campaign . He says Bain desperately needs support of white working-class vote . That demographic group is most likely to be put off by outsourcing , Mitt Romney 's says . Frum : Romney 's effort to dissociate himself from Romney put him in an odd position .