SALT LAKE CITY â€" Mitt Romney's traveling press secretary walked to the back of the candidate's plane midflight on Tuesday and teasingly asked a pair of journalists in an exit row if they were “willing and able to assist in case of an emergency.â€
Under the circumstances, it was hard to tell whether it was a question or a request.
A palpably gloomy and openly frustrated mood has begun to envelop Mr. Romney's campaign for president. Well practiced in the art of lurching from public relations crisis to public relations crisis, his team seemed to reach its limit as it digested a ubiquitous set of video clips that showed their boss candidly describing nearly half of the country's population as g overnment-dependent “victims,†and saying that he would “kick the ball down the road†on the biggest foreign policy challenge of the past few decades, the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
Grim-faced aides acknowledged that it was an unusually dark moment, made worse by the self-inflicted, seemingly avoidable nature of the wound. In low-volume, out-of-the-way conversations, they are now wondering whether victory is still possible and whether they are entering McCain-Palin ticket territory.
A flustered adviser, describing the mood, said that the campaign was turning into a vulgar, unprintable phrase.
Aides did little to hide their annoyance: on Tuesday night, a Romney aide cursed loudly as he tried to corral reporters into an impromptu news conference in Costa Mesa, Calif.
Mr. Romney himself seemed pensive on the early-morning flight Tuesday from California to Utah, sitting alone with a white legal pad and a pen a s he picked at a vegetarian breakfast burrito. An aide said that he had eaten dinner alone in his hotel room the night before as the video controversy began to unfold.
The campaign did its best to change the subject. At an airport in Salt Lake City, Kevin Madden, a senior adviser, waved a group of reporters over to look at his iPhone. It displayed a headline in the Romney-friendly Drudge Report about a poll that showed the presidential race tightening.
A few hours later, Mr. Romney's staff members summoned a handful of reporters to watch him carry four of his young grandchildren across a tarmac here and onto his plane for a tour.
But the video kept coming up anyway. When pressed, Mr. Madden offered a relentlessly on-message reply to questions about the candidate's mood and reaction to the drip-drip-drip release of the fund-raiser footage by Mother Jones magazine.
“We're still focused,†he said. “This is an election that is focused on the economy . It's focused on the direction of the country.â€
Mr. Madden wanted to be clear: despite the video, Mr. Romney was focused, a word he used eight times. “We remain pretty focused and determined,†he said, before opting for a stronger adjective. “Very focused and determined,†he said.
The campaign did its best to blunt the onslaught, starting on Monday afternoon.
Around 4 p.m., Garrett Jackson, Mr. Romney's closest aide, showed the candidate the grainy video from the fund-raiser on an iPad during a car ride.
It was a buzz kill: Mr. Romney had just finished his inaugural intelligence briefing at a local F.B.I. building, a ritual reserved for those just inches from the presidency.
The next minute, he was watching himself deliver those words â€" about the “47 percent†and “dependents†â€" to a group of wealthy campaign donors in Florida.
Mr. Romney and his advisers quickly grasped the severity of the footage. A decision was mad e: Mr. Romney must go in front of cameras immediately to explain himself, lest questions about the video linger and overshadow two full days of his campaign at a crucial stage in the general election.
By Tuesday afternoon, the campaign seemed to find its footing. Aides inside Mr. Romney's Boston headquarters began highlighting a video of their own: a 1998 clip showing Barack Obama, then a state senator, saying that he wanted the government to facilitate the distribution of wealth. “I actually believe in redistribution,†Mr. Obama said on the tape.
Soon, Mr. Romney was on Fox News, his television comfort zone, mocking the video. Twitter lit up with Romney aides taking the president to task for his word choice.
Suddenly, the mood in the Romney camp began to perk up, ever so slightly.
As the campaign plane landed in Dallas on Tuesday night, Mr. Romney got on the intercom to welcome home two reporters whose families live in Texas, one from CNN, the o ther from NBC News. He said he was sorry to miss a planned pool party that one of the reporters planned to hold In the evening. “I was a little offended not to be invited for cobbler,†he said, playfully. He asked that some be brought to him on Wednesday.
