With Romney, From Des Moines To Portsmouth

Around midnight, Mitt Romney entered the gangway of a packed Jet Blue A330 to a round of applause from his staff, and he spent the next several minutes shaking hands with his young aides. The stress of the night was visible, not on his face, with had broken into a wide smile, but at his forehead, where a lock of hair uncharacteristically hung down.

Romney then spoke to the plane. “We’re going to Manchester, right?” (No, Portsmouth.)

“Ah, we’ll have a great rally there when we land.” He noticed that reporters were sitting three to a row. “Only three to a row? Come on, we should have five to a row.” That would mean, a reporter said, “more reporters on the plane.”

Flight attendants told all of us to turn off our blackberries, the captain, having been briefed on a special security matter by a senior official at the department of homeland security, promised a quick two hour-15 minute flight, and we were off.

En route, Romney’s aides -- his campaign manager, Beth Myers, his most senior aides, his press staff, his lawyer – they spent the flight huddled together. There are strategic disagreements on the campaign, but these folks like each other – the Romney campaign is a pretty friendly place to work. So the mood was not as somber as it could have been.

The press corps drank (mostly soda and water) and watched CNN. Almost no one slept. At 3:30 am ET, the plane landed on runway 16 at PSM.

Why Portsmouth? The campaign wanted to hold an early morning rally, and the FBO at
Manchester-Boston airport wouldn’t allow them.

The press deplaned, and about five minutes later, the large steel doors of an airplane hanger opened up, and Romney, surrounded by about a dozen photographers, walked onto a small stage.

He was pumped – it’s hard to believe, but he really was.

Romney said he was happy to beat John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson – and, “well, I let one slip by me.”

“This presidential election has underscored …. we want change. And it’s not change in the White House, so much, as we want change in Washington. We face extraordinary challenges and Washington is broken and just isn’t getting the job done. “

No – I didn’t accidentally paste in my notes from an Edwards and Obama rally, as the next sentence makes clear.

Romney: “They’re concerned about illegal immigration and Washington hasn’t fixed that.”

And then a litany of middle class concerns:

“They’re concerned about people not having health insurance.”

“And they’re concerned about jobs in this country are going overseas, particularly to Asia, and Washington hasn’t fixed that.”

“And they’re concerned about schools, that are father behind that the rest of the world, and Washington hasn’t fixed that.”

"Some people say…All we need to do change Washington is to have the same people go there, but change there. … to bring someone in… I’m talking about me,…who can bring the kind of change-do change experience that I’ve had everywhere I’ve been. I’ve changed business. I’ve changed the Olympics. And I’m going to change Washington. We’re going to take it apart and put it back together again, this time smaller, smarter and simpler."

Loud applause from the 100-or so campaign volunteers who shivered for an hour waiting for Romney’s arrival.

The wind chill was about negative 10 degrees, so the airplane hanger door was quickly shut.

And then a moment that may or not be symbolic of something, that may or may not stick in the minds of Romney’s traveling press corps, a moment that, well, almost ruined what had been a fairly exuberant welcome home. Not really a moment – it was more like a good hour.

For some reason, it took the staff of the Pease FBO an hour to off-load baggage from the airplane. There were plenty of baggage carts. Plenty of people. And for a half hour, the bags just sat on the carts as about 60 of us – Romney family, Romney friends, Romney donors, the press corps, Carl Cameron of Fox, Jeff Greenfield of CBS, Glen Johnson of the AP – were trapped into a glass-enclosed lobby.

And the fundamental miscommunication was this: the tarmac staff assumed we’d all go outside and retrieve our own luggage. But the folks who ran the place refused to let us out because the airport has special security procedures. Half the luggage was loaded onto a big press bus. That took, for some reason, 40 minutes. But half of the folks who traveled with Romney – including most of his family – were headed back to Boston. So their luggage needed to be segregated.

Two members of Romney’s advance staff convinced the FBO operators to let them onto the tarmac and start bringing the bags into the building.

As the press corps got progressively annoyed, Romney’s staff grew progressively anxious. No one received special treatment – one Scott Romney – the brother of the candidate – waited as long as we did.

After watching these guys struggle and drag two bags at a time, 100 yards a run , there was some shouting and arguing, and a door was forced, and communication was restored, bags were gotten, and here we are.

The Romney campaign later sent its press corps a note of apology.

But the ghost of Sam Donaldson, who once wrote an entire ABC News piece around a malfunctioning microphone at a Michael Dukakis event, was ever-present.

Campaigns reflect their candidate, and the Romney campaign is known for its efficiency and ease of operation; tonight was a rare exception to that record of service.