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One morning in January, Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of the conservative magazine and Web site Newsmax, sat with Mitt Romney in his hotel room at the West Palm Beach Courtyard Marriott in Florida and offered some blunt advice about dealing with the news media.
He needed to do a better job reaching out to conservative writers and pundits, Mr. Ruddy told the candidate. But then, sensing that he wasn’t breaking through, Mr. Ruddy stopped.
“There was a lack of interest on his part as to specific recommendations I might have,” he later recalled.
“My feeling from them was that while they were happy to listen to the information, they weren’t going to act on it.”
From the television studios of Fox News to the pages of The Weekly Standard, the refrain of the conservative opinion machine is virtually the same: Mitt Romney doesn’t talk to us, doesn’t get us.
Mr. Romney’s distant, complicated relationship with many of the conservative media’s leading voices has heightened concerns that his convictions are not as genuine and deep-seated as their own. Many commentators have pounced on some of Mr. Romney’s recent remarks — saying that he is “not concerned about the very poor” because they have a government safety net and that he was a “severely conservative” governor — as proof that he cannot speak their language.
“The real problem here is that it shows he doesn’t have fluency with conservative ideas,” Charles Krauthammer, the conservative columnist, said on Fox News.
Or, as Rush Limbaugh noted the other day on his radio show, “I have never heard anybody say, ‘I’m severely conservative.’”
