It was nearly a year ago when David Plouffe, a senior adviser to President Obama, said Mitt Romney "has no core." He was referring to the former Massachusetts governor's legendary flip-flops on issues like abortion and climate change. The charge was hardly an original one, as similar criticisms were voiced about Romney by Republicans when he ran for president in 2008.
Earlier this year in a GOP debate, Romney described himself as a "severe conservative," and has run most of this year as just that, rarely talking about how he worked with Democrats across the aisle in Massachusetts to get things accomplished, most significantly his health care reform plan later copied by the Obama administration on a federal level.
Romney's hardline stances have been detrimental to his chances with Latino voters, for example, but he's never shown much confidence in moving to the center, where presidential elections are generally won or lost.
But with Wednesday night's debate and his follow-up appearance in St. Petersburg Friday night, Romney now seems to be making that shift to the center that analysts predicted he would inevitably do — but is it too late?
Part of humanizing Mitt to his audiences is showing the 10-minute feature about Romney that was first shown at the Republican convention in Tampa, but not in prime time:
This article appears in Oct 4-10, 2012.