Rogers: Mitt Romney's overblown campaign 'problem'

The stories about infighting within the Romney campaign appear to be worse than usual for a couple of reasons.

First, Mitt Romney doesn't have a large, loyal core within the Republican Party. Deservedly, he is admired, but many of the people who are for Romney support him because they are against President Barack Obama. In other words, much of the party shares a common goal, rather than an emotional bond, with Romney.

Romney also doesn't have much of a following in Washington, but the nation's capital has a critical mass of "experts" who are vocal, confident and ignorant -- and who react to every news cycle. If Romney has a flat couple of days or a bad poll, the anti-Obama forces worry and the Washington talkers want to explain why it's happening, all in real time. This means Romney has very little room for error. Any mistake frightens many voters who believe the election might be slipping away and handed to Obama. This is silly.

It's way too early to panic -- and I'm a person who believes in the power of an occasional panic. In George H.W. Bush's White House, in which I worked, there was nothing the president hated worse than a panicker. But a panicker was defined as anyone who wanted to do anything to extricate the president from whatever pounding he might be taking at the time. I was often labeled a panicker.

By any historical measure, the Romney campaign is in pretty good shape. Romney is no more than 2 to 4 percentage points down in the polls, he's about even with money and there is no way Obama's supporters have the same enthusiasm as those who want to remove him from office.

Writer Ed Rogers is a co-host of The Insiders blog, offering commentary from a Republican perspective on the 2012 election. He is also chairman of the lobbying and communications firm BGR Group, which he founded with Haley Barbour in 1991.