Mitt Romney means business

Mitt Romney came to Manhattan for a day in mid-December to ask for money from his Wall Street friends. In a tactical shift preceded by Newt Gingrich's unexpected surge in the polls, he also sat for a series of interviews with news outlets, including Fortune. I had been trailing Romney for a while. The week before, in a parking lot in Manchester, N.H., after his advance team turned down the volume on the country music, I had watched him deliver a campaign speech, awkwardly, from the cargo bed of a pickup truck. A few days later I listened while he endured a hostile query from an anti-Islamic zealot at a town hall gathering inside an animal-feed factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Hardly a scientific sample, but I have to say he seemed a lot more comfortable, more human, talking business across a conference table at the Regency Hotel on Park Avenue.