Romney working to connect personally with voters

FARGO, N.D. — His two latest victories aside, Republican presidential front-runner Mitt Romney is working to connect more personally with voters and refocus his campaign on the protracted fight for convention delegates as he tries to recover from a difficult month and answer key questions about the strength of his candidacy.

Yet, even as Romney launched an effort to address his vulnerabilities, the former Massachusetts governor created fresh controversy and irked conservatives anew by equivocating on a Senate bill on insurance coverage of birth control.

It was an ill-timed hiccup just as Romney, the nominal GOP front-runner for the past year, tries to capitalize on twin victories in Arizona and Michigan and put to rest concerns within the GOP establishment about his inability to wrap up the nomination quickly, proclivity for self-made errors and struggles to relate to audiences. His efforts to improve on those fronts were on clear display Wednesday, starting with a town-hall style meeting in Bexley, Ohio.

"By far the most important thing in my life is my wife. All right? Ann and I fell in love young, we're still in love. We have a marriage that is still filled with love," Romney told his rapt audience after a sympathetic voter asked him to "show the American people you have a lot of heart."

It was one of the most emotional moments of his campaign, with Romney talking at length about his five sons and saying he didn't think his "heart could get bigger," until they married and his grandkids were born. He talked of other personal experiences before pivoting to the American public at large — and making this pitch: "This is a family crisis going on in America, and I think I can help. I can't solve all the problems, but I can make a difference, and that's why I am in this race."

Behind the scenes, Romney's aides, as well as an independent committee supporting him, spent the day working to recalibrate the candidate's approach to next week's Super Tuesday contests, when 10 states will vote and Wyoming will begin its caucuses, and beyond. In almost all of the future contests in the nomination fight, delegates to the Republican Party's national presidential nominating convention in late summer will be awarded proportionally among the candidates.

Given that, Romney can't rely on momentum alone to carry him to the nomination. His team must gird anew for a long delegate slog as well as the reality that his chief rivals — Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich — are showing no signs of dropping out as long as super PACs aligned with them keep running expensive TV ads on their behalf.