“It isn’t slipping away,” Romney’s Political Director Rich Beeson says emphatically – on the cusp of mild-mannered exasperation – when the media’s doomsday narrative is first broached. A Colorado native and a major player on the successful Bush/Cheney re-elect effort in 2004, Beeson is even-keeled and good natured, yet his disdain for the emerging conventional wisdom that Obama has the election in the bag is palpable. Asked about rumors that Ohio is in danger of falling off the map for Romney, he shakes his head. “I’m going to push back really hard on that Ohio stuff,” he says. “There is...