September 20, 2012 04:41 PM UTC

Mitt's Never Gonna Give You Up, Colorado

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• by: Colorado Pols

FOX 31’s Eli Stokols:

Mitt Romney will campaign in Denver Sunday and Monday as his campaign looks to increase the pace of daily rallies and events in an effort to shift the trajectory of the race for the White House.

The Romney campaign confirmed Thursday that all of the events on the visit – Romney’s first to Colorado in more than a month – will take place in Denver…

Since Monday, as Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign struggled to manage yet another unexpected controversy, conservative hand-wringing intensified as Republican partisans worried aloud if there’s any way for their candidate to turn things around.

In Colorado, prominent conservatives far enough removed from the campaign to speak freely and honestly asked the same question about Romney: where has he been?

If you’re counting, that will be 49 days since Romney last visited Colorado. Politico does its best to explain Mitt Romney’s new strategy:

A campaign official said: “In a lot of the current survey data, there’s a desire among the electorate to know more about Mitt in terms of how he would lead. Over the next six weeks, the campaign is going to provide a lot more of that.”

…The plan, described by top aides and advisers in interviews this week, is an acknowledgment that Romney is in enough of a hole that he cannot depend on the presidential debates to turn his candidacy around. In fact, Romney, who recently did five mock debates in a 48-hour period to practice, has confided to advisers that it may be hard to win a debate because every attack against President Barack Obama will seem stale while the attacks on him will seem fresher and newsier to a hostile media.

Instead, Romney plans to dial back on fundraisers and vastly increase his personal appearances – on the stump and in ads – to convince what’s left of the undecided voters that Obama has been a disappointment and that he has a specific plan that is less risky than the status quo.

To be fair, Romney did try to visit Pueblo last weekend, a campaign stop that was thwarted by a plane crash at Pueblo Airport. On another front, John Ingold of the Denver paper reports this morning on damage control efforts from local Romney surrogates like Colorado Republican Party chairman Ryan Call and 2006 GOP gubernatorial candidate Bob Beauprez, responding to the exposure on Monday of damaging video of Romney disparaging roughly half of the country as “victims” who “believe the government has a responsibility to care for them.”

Beauprez charges on Romney’s behalf that Barack Obama wants to “out-Europe the Europeans, only do it on steroids.” In response to Romney’s “victims” comments, the Romney campaign is circulating a 1998 video of Obama saying he is in favor of “redistribution, at least at a certain level to make sure that everybody’s got a shot.”

We’ll let the Obama campaign explain that statement–we suspect it will poll better than Romney’s explanations for his remarks. But while we’re on the subject, what does “out-Europe the Europeans on steroids” even mean? Is that some kind of Lance Armstrong joke?

Romney’s right about one thing. The surrogates aren’t cutting it.

Bottom line: polling has consistently shown, for whatever reason, a tighter race here in Colorado than a surprising number of other swing states. Obama remains narrowly ahead here in most polling, but as other swing states slowly move out of Romney’s grasp, Colorado becomes even more critical to the GOP’s rapidly narrowing path to victory in this election.

As a result, we’re about to see a lot more Mitt Romney, and a lot less Bob Beauprez.